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THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE SOUL 
OF DEMOCRACY 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD WAR 
IN RELATION TO HUxMAN LIBERTY 

BY 

EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS 



Man for the State means autocracy and imperialism; 
Man for Mankind is the soul of democracy. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 

All rights reserved 



•^ 



Copyright, 1918 



By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 
Set up and Electrotyped. Published, Januaiy. 19x8 



f£S -7 1918 

©Ci.A4816G5 



-V^. I 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER '^®* 

I The World Tragedy i 

II The Conflict of Ideas in the War . 7 

III The Ideas for Which the Allied Na- 

tions Fight i^ 

IV Moral Standards and the Moral 

Order • • ^9 

V The Present State of International 

Relations 25 

VI The Ethics of International Rela- 
tionship 36 

VII America's Duty in International 

Relations 44 

VIII The Gospel and the Superstition of 

Non-Resistance 5° 

IX Preparedness for Self-Defense . . 57 

X Reconstruction from the War ... 68 

XI The War and Education .... 7^ 

XII Socialism AND the War 79 

XIII The War AND Feminism 85 

XIV The Transformation OF Democracy . 89 
XV Democracy AND Education . . . . ioi 

XVI Menaces OF Democracy io9 

V 



vi 


CONTENTS 




XVII 


The Dilemma OF Democracy. . . 


. 117 


XVIII 


Paternalism versus Democracy . 


. 122 


XIX 


The Solution for Democracy . 


. 128 


XX 


Training for Moral Leadership . 


. 136 


XXI 


Democracy AND Sacrifice 


146 


XXII 


The Hour of Sacrifice .... 


. 156 



THE 
SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 



THE WORLD TRAGEDY 

We are living under the shadow of the 
greatest world tragedy in the history of man- 
kind. Not even the overthrow of the old Ro- 
man empire was so colossal a disaster as this. 
Inevitably we are bewildered by it. Utterly 
unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for 
we had believed mankind too far advanced for 
such a chaos of brute force to recur, it over- 
whelms our vision. Man had been going for- 
ward steadily, inventing and discovering, un- 
til in the last hundred years his whole world 
had been transformed. Suddenly the entire 
range of invention is turned against Man. 
The machinery of comfort and progress be- 
comes the enginery of devastation. Under 
such a shock, we ask, "Has civilization over- 
reached itself? Has the machine run away 



2 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

with its maker?" The imagination is stag- 
gered. We are too much in the storm to see 
across the storm. 

When the War began, it was over our minds 
as a dark cloud. It was the last conscious 
thought as we went to sleep at night, and the 
first to which we awakened in the morning: 
wakening with a dumb sense of something 
wrong, as if we had suffered a personal trag- 
edy, and then as we came to clear conscious- 
ness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days 
have passed into weeks, the weeks into months 
and years: inevitably we become benumbed 
to the long continued disaster. It is impos- 
sible to think deaths and mutilations in terrps 
of millions. Even those who stand in the im- 
mediate presence of it and suffer most terribly 
become calloused to it: much more must we 
who stood so long apart and have not yet felt 
the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the 
whirling vortex, drawing ever nearer our 
shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing 
sense of it. Nevertheless, these years through 
which we are now living are the most impor- 
tant in the entire history of the world. It is 
probable that the future will look back upon 



THE WORLD TRAGEDY 3 

them as the years determining the destiny of 
mankind for ages to come. 

How this terrible fact of War falls across 
all philosophies! Complacent optimisms, so 
widely current recently, are put out of court 
by it. The pleasant interpretations mediocrity 
formulates of the universe are torn to tatters. 
There is at least the refreshment of standing 
face to face with brute actuality, though it 
crash all our ^^ittle systems" to the ground. 
Philosophy must wait. The interpretations 
cannot be hastened, while the facts are multi- 
plying with such bewildering rapidity. The 
one certainty is that an entirely new world is 
being born — what it will be, no one knows. 

Nevertheless, we have gone far enough to 
recognize that all our thinking will be trans- 
formed under the influence of the struggle. 
It will be impossible for us, after the War, to 
do what we have done so widely hitherto : pro- 
claim one range of ethical ideals and stand- 
ards, and live to something widely different 
in practice. Either we shall have to abandon 
the standards, or bring our conduct measur- 
ably into harmony with them. We shall be 
unable longer to hold unconsciously in solu- 



4 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

tion Christianity and the gospel of brute force. 
One or the other must be rejected, or both 
consciously reconstructed. The effect on the 
thought life of the world will be even greater 
— vastly greater — than that of the French 
Revolution. The twentieth century will dif- 
fer from the nineteenth more than that did 
from the eighteenth. The effect on the rela- 
tions of different social groups throughout the 
world will be so far-reaching that possibly the 
democracy and socialism of the nineteenth 
century may look like remote historic phe- 
nomena, such as the Athenian tribal system or 
mediaeval feudalism. 

Thus our whole social philosophy will have 
to be remolded. We Americans are still in 
the patent medicine period of politics, trust- 
ing to political devices on the surface for the 
cure of any evils that arise. All across the 
country, like an epidemic of disease has gone 
the notion — if anything is the matter with us, 
just pass another law. Thus we are suffer- 
ing under an ill-considered mass of legislation, 
while blindly trusting to it to solve all prob- 
lems. Legislation is no solution for moral 
evils. It is possible, to some extent, to sup- 



THE WORLD TRAGEDY 5 

press vice by legislation, but not to create vir- 
tue. Virtue can be developed only by conduct 
and education. You cannot drive men into the 
kingdom of heaven with the whip of legisla- 
tion; and if you could, you would so change 
the atmosphere of the place that one would 
prefer to take the other road. 

If our democracy is to survive, we must 
think it through ; carrying it down, from these 
superficial political devices, into our industry 
and commerce, still so largely dominated by 
feudal ideas of the middle age, into our science 
and art, far more completely into our educa- 
tion, into our social relationship, and beyond 
all else, into our fundamental attitude of 
mind. Democracy is, at bottom, not a series 
of political forms, but a way of life. 

Thus the War will be the supreme test of 
democracy. The question it will settle is this : 
can free men, by voluntary cooperation, de- 
velop an efficiency and an endurance which 
will make it possible for them to stand and 
protect their liberties against the machinery 
and aggressive ambitions of autocratic em- 
pires where everything is done paternally 
from the top? If they can, then democracy 



6 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

will survive and grow as the highest form of 
society for ages to come; if not, then democ- 
racy will pass and be succeeded by some other 
social order. 

That is why this War has been our war 
from the beginning, though we have entered 
it so late. As we look back upon the struggle 
of Athens and the other free Greek cities with 
the overwhelming hordes of Asia, at Mara- 
thon and Salamis, as the conflict that saved de- 
mocracy for Europe and made possible the 
civilization of the Occident, so it is probable 
that the world will look back upon this colos- 
sal War as the same struggle, multiplied a 
thousand times in the men and munitions em- 
ployed, the struggle determining the future of 
democracy and civilization for generations, 
perhaps for all time. 



II 

THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE 

WAR 

The world has been confused as to the issue 
in this War, because of the multitude of its 
causes and of the antagonisms it involves ; yet 
under all the national and racial hatreds, the 
economic jealousies, certain great ideas are be- 
ing tested out. 

Apologists for Germany have told us, even 
with pride, that in Germany the supreme con- 
ception is the dedication of Man to the State. 
This was not true of old Germany. Before 
the formation of the Prussian empire, her 
spirit was intensely individualistic. She stood 
preeminently for freedom of thought and ac- 
tion. It was this that gave her noble spiritual 
heritage. Goethe is the most individualistic 
of world masters. Froebel developed, in the 
Kindergarten, one of the purest of democra- 
cies.. Luther and German protestantism rep- 



8 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

resented the affirmation of individual con- 
science as against hierarchical control. It was 
this spirit that gave Germany her golden age 
of literature, her unmatched group of spiritual 
philosophers, her religious teachers, her pre- 
eminence in music. 

Nevertheless, the Prussian state, autocratic 
from its inception, received philosophic justi- 
fication in a series of thinkers, culminating in 
Hegel, who regarded the individual as a ca- 
pricious egotist, the state, incarnate in its 
sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity. He 
justified war, regarding it as a permanent ne- 
cessity, and practically made might, right, in 
arguing that a conquering nation is justified 
by its more fruitful idea in annexing the 
weaker, while the conquered, in being con- 
quered, is judged of God. Here is the philo- 
sophic justification of that Prussian arrogance 
which in Nietzsche is carried into glittering 
rhetoric. Thus the Prussian state from afar 
back was opposed to the general spirit of old 
Germany. 

Since 1870, it must be admitted, that spirit 
is gone. With the formation of the Prussian 
empire and for the half century of its exist- 



THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 9 

ence, every force of social control — press, 
church, state, education, social opinion — was 
deliberately employed to stamp on the Ger- 
man people one idea — the subordination of 
the individual to the state, as the supreme and 
only virtue. How far has the policy suc- 
ceeded? Apparently absolutely. To the out- 
side observer the old spirit seems utterly gone. 
How far this policy has been helped by the 
cultivation of the fear of the Slav, one cannot 
say. Looking at the map of Europe, one sees 
that the geographical relation of Germany to 
the great Slavic empire is not unlike the re- 
lation of Holland to Germany. Thus the de- 
liberate fostering of fear of the vast empire 
of the East has done much to strengthen the 
hands of the Prussian regime in its chosen 
task. 

Nevertheless, v^^hen one recalls the spiritual 
heritage of Germany: when one thinks of 
Herder, Schiller and Goethe; Tauler, Luther 
and Schleiermacher; Froebel, Herbart and 
Richter; Kant, Fichte and Novalis; Mozart, 
Beethoven and Wagner; one feels that some- 
thing of the old German heritage must sur- 
vive. When the German people find out what 



10 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

has happened to them and why, that heritage 
surely ought to show in some reaction against 
the present autocratic regime, after the War 
closes, if not before, perhaps even to the ex- 
tent of making Germany a republic. That 
would be some compensation for the waste 
and destruction of the War. Meantime Ger- 
many stands now, ruthlessly, for the dedica- 
tion of Man to the State. 

One can understand why a Prussian minis- 
ter forbade the teaching of Froebel's ideas in 
Prussia during the latter period of the educa- 
tor's life. So one understands the hatred of 
Goethe because he refused allegiance to a nar- 
row nationalism and remained cosmopolitan 
in his world-view. Similarly Hegel, with his 
justification of absolute monarchy and his the- 
ory of the German state as the acme of all 
spiritual evolution, was the acclaimed ortho- 
dox philosopher of Prussia, while the individ- 
ualist, Schopenhauer, was neglected and de= 
spised. 

One must have lived in Germany to realize 
the absolute control of the State over the in- 
dividual — the incessant surveillance, the petty 
regulations, the constant interference with pri- 



THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS ii 

vate life. It was to escape just this vexatious 
control, with the arduous militarism in which 
it culminates, that so vast a multitude of Ger- 
mans left their native land and came to the 
United States — not all of whom have shown 
appreciation and loyalty to the free land that 
welcomed them. 



Ill 

THE IDEAS FOR WHICH THE 
ALLIED NATIONS FIGHT 

In contrast to the idea for which Germany 
now stands, the Anglo-Saxon instinctively and 
tenaciously believes in the liberty and initia- 
tive of the individual. We, of course, are no 
longer Anglo-Saxon. When De Tocqueville 
in 1 83 1 visited our country, surveyed our in- 
stitutions and, after returning home, made his 
trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he 
could justly designate us Anglo-Americans. 
That time is past; we are to-day everything 
and nothing: a great nation in the womb of 
time, struggling to be born. 

Nevertheless, Anglo-American ideas still 
dominate and inspire our civilization. It is, 
indeed, remarkable to what an extent this is 
true, in the face of the mingling of hetero- 
geneous races in our population. As English 
is our speech, so Anglo-American ideas are 

still the soul of our life and institutions. 

12 



IDEAS FOUGHT FOR 13 

This is evident in the jealousy of authority. 
We resent the intrusion of the government into 
affairs of private life, and prefer to submit to 
annoyances and even injustice on the part of 
other individuals, rather than to have protec- 
tion at the price of paternalistic regulation by 
the state. We resent any law that we do not 
see is necessary to the general welfare, and are 
rather lawless even then. This shows clearly 
in our reaction on legislation in regard to 
drink. The prohibition of intoxicating liquor 
is about the surest way to make an Anglo- 
Saxon want to go out and get drunk, even 
when he has no other inclination in that direc- 
tion. In Boston, under the eleven o'clock clos- 
ing law, men in public restaurants will at 
times order, at ten minutes of eleven, eight or 
ten glasses of beer or whiskey, for fear they 
might want them, whereas, if the restriction 
had not been present, two or three would have 
sufficed. 

Not long ago we saw the very labor leaders 
who forced the Adamson law through con- 
gress, threatening to disobey any legislation 
limiting their own freedom of action, even 
though vitally necessary to the freedom of all. 



14 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

The general behavior under automobile and 
traffic regulation illustrates the tendency even 
more clearly. Thinking over the list of ac- 
quaintances who own automobiles, one finds 
it hard to recall one who would not break the 
speed law at a convenient opportunity. Even 
a staid college professor, who has walked the 
walled-in path all his life: let him get a Ford 
runabout, and in three months he is exultant 
in running as close as possible to every foot 
traveler and in exceeding the speed limit at 
any favorable chance. These are not beauti- 
ful expressions of our national spirit, but they 
serve to illustrate our instinctive individual- 
ism. 

Especially are we jealous of highly central- 
ized authority. De Tocqueville argued that 
we would never be able to develop a strong 
central government, and that our democracy 
would be menaced with failure by that lack. 
That his prophecy has proved false and our 
federal government has become so strong is 
due only to the accidents of our history and 
the exigency of the tremendous problems we 
have had to solve. 

The same individualistic spirit is strong in 



IDEAS FOUGHT FOR 15 

England. It has been particularly evident, 
during the War, in the resentment of mili- 
tary authority as applied to labor conditions. 
The artisans and their leaders dreaded to give 
up liberties for which they had struggled 
through generations, for fear that those rights 
would not be readily accorded them again 
after the War. It must be admitted that this 
fear is justified. The same spirit was evi- 
dent in the fight on conscription. This atti- 
tude has been a handicap to England in suc- 
cessfully carrying on the War, as it is to us; 
but it shows how strong is the essential spirit 
of democracy in both lands. 

In France, the Revolution was at bottom 
an aflSrmation of individualism — of the right 
of the people, as against classes and kings, to 
seek life, liberty and happiness. The great 
words. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, that the 
French placed upon their public buildings in 
the period of the Revolution, are the essential 
battle-cry of true democracy, — as it is to be, 
rather than as it is at present. 

Through her peculiar situation, threatened 
and overshadowed by potential enemies, 
France has been forced to a policy of militar- 



i6 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

ism, with a large subordination of the individ- 
ual to the state. The subordination, how- 
ever, is voluntary. That is touchingly evident 
in the beautiful fraternization of French of- 
ficers and men in the present War. With our 
Anglo-Saxon reserve, we smile at the pictures 
of grave generals kissing bearded soldiers, in 
recognition of valor, but it is a significant ex- 
pression of the voluntary equality and brother- 
hood of Frenchmen in this War. The reason 
France has risen with such splendid courage 
and unity is the consciousness of every French- 
man that complete defeat in this War would 
mean that there would be no France in the 
future, that Paris would be a larger Strass- 
burg, and France a greater Alsace-Lorraine. 
While the subordination has been thus volun- 
tary, surely the French soldiers, man for man, 
have proved themselves the equal of any sol- 
diers on earth. 

The anomaly of the first two years of the 
War was the presence of the vast Russian auto- 
cratic empire on the side of the allied democ- 
racies. For Russia, however, the War was 
of the people, rather than of the autocracy at 
the top, and one saw that Pvussia would emerge 



IDEAS FOUGHT FOR 17 

from the War changed and purified. What 
one could not foresee was that, under the 
awakening of the people, Russia could pass, 
in a day, through a Revolution as profound in 
its character and consequences as the great ex- 
plosion in France. It would be almost a mir- 
acle if so complete a Revolution, in such a 
vast, benighted empire, were not followed by 
decades of recurrent chaos and anarchy. If 
Russia avoids this fate, she will present a 
unique experience in history. The tendency 
to abrogate all authority, the spectacle of regi- 
ments of soldiers becoming debating societies 
to discuss whether or not they shall obey or- 
ders and fight, are ominous signs for the next 
period. Emancipated Russia must learn, if 
necessary through bitter suffering, that lib- 
erty is not license, that democracy is not an- 
archy, but voluntary and intelligent obedience 
to just laws and the chosen executors of those 
laws. Meantime, whatever her immediate fu- 
ture may be, Russia's transformation has clari- 
fied the issue and justified her place with the 
allied democracies. However long and con- 
fused her struggle, there can be no return to 



i8 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

the past, and, in the end, her Revolution 
means democracy. 

Thus, in democracy, the State exists for 
Man. Other forms of society seek the interest 
or welfare of an individual, a group or a class, 
democracy aims at the welfare, that is, the lib- 
erty, happiness, growth, intelligence, helpful- 
ness of all the people. Under all the welter 
of this world struggle, it is therefore these 
great contrasting ideas that are being tested 
out, perhaps for all time. What is their rela- 
tive value for efficiency, initiative, invention, 
endurance, permanence; beneath all, what is 
their final value for the happiness and help- 
fulness of all human beings? 



IV 



MORAL STANDARDS AND THE 
MORAL ORDER 

There is only one moral order of the uni- 
verse — one range of moral as of physical law. 
For instance, the law of gravitation — simplest 
of physical principles — holds the last star in 
the abyss of space, rounds the dew-drop on 
the petal of a spring violet and determines the 
symmetry of living organisms; but it is one 
and unchanging, a fundamental pull in the 
nature of matter itself. So with moral laws: 
they are not superadded to life by some divine 
or other authority. They are simply the fun- 
damental principles in the nature of life itself, 
which we must obey to grow and be happy. 

If the moral order is one and unchanging, 
man does change in relation to it, and moral 
standards are relative to the stage of his 
growth. History is filled with illustrations of 
this relativity of ethical standards. 

19 



20 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

For instance: human slavery doubtless be- 
gan as an act of beneficence on the part of 
some philanthropist well in advance of his 
age. The first man who, in the dim dawn of 
history, said to the captive he had made in 
war, ''I will not kill you and eat you; I will 
let you live and work for me the rest of your 
life": that man instituted human slavery; but 
it was distinctly a step upward, from some- 
thing that had been far worse. 

Homer represents Ulysses as the favorite 
pupil of Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom: 
why? Baldly stated, because Ulysses was the 
shrewdest and most successful liar in classic 
antiquity. If Ulysses were to appear in a so- 
ciety of decent men to-day, he would be ex- 
cluded from their companionship, and for 
the same reason that led Homer to glorify 
him as the favorite pupil of the goddess of 
wisdom. Thus what is a virtue at one stage 
of development becomes a vice as man climbs 
to higher recognition of the moral order. 

Just because the moral standard is relative, 
it is absolutely binding where it applies. In 
other words, if you see the light shining on 
your path, you owe obedience to the light; one 



MORAL STANDARDS 21 

who does not see it, does not owe obedience 
in the same way. If you do not obey your 
light, your punishment is that you lose the 
light — degenerate to a lower plane, and it is 
the worst punishment imaginable. 

Thus the same act may be for the undevel- 
oped life, non-moral, for the developed, dis- 
tinctly immoral. Before the instincts of per- 
sonal modesty and purity were developed, 
careless sex-promiscuity meant something en- 
tirely different from what a descent to it means 
in our society. When a man of some primi- 
tive tribe went out and killed a man of an- 
other tribe, the action was totally different 
morally from the murder by a man of one 
community of a citizen of a neighboring town 
to-day. 

This gradual elevation of moral standards, 
or growth in the recognition of the sacredness 
of life and the obligation to other individuals, 
can be traced historically as a long and con- 
fused process. There was a time, in the re- 
mote past, when no law was recognized ex- 
cept that of the strong arm. The man who 
wanted anything, took it, if he was strong 
enough, and others submitted to his superior 



22 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

force. Then follows an age when the family 
is the supreme social unit. Each member of 
the family group feels the pain or pleasure of 
all the others as something like his own, but 
all outside this circle are as the beasts. This 
is the condition among the Veddahs of Cey- 
lon, studied so interestingly by Haeckel. Liv- 
ing in isolated family groups, scattered 
through the tropical wilderness: one man, one 
woman and their children forming the social 
unit: they as nearly represent primitive life 
as any other body of people now on the earth. 
Then follows a long roll of ages when the 
tribe is the highest social unit. Each mem- 
ber of the tribe is conscious of the sacredness 
of life of all the other members and of some 
obligation toward them; but men of other 
tribes may be slain as freely as the beasts. 
Then comes a period when appreciation of the 
sacredness of life is extended over all those of 
the same race, tested generally by their speak- 
ing somewhat the same language. That was 
the condition in classic antiquity: it was "Jew 
and Gentile," "Greek and barbarian" — the 
very word "barbarous" coming from the un- 
intelligible sounds, to the Greeks, of those who 



MORAL STANDARDS 23 

spoke other than the Hellenic tongue. Even 
Plato, with all his far-sighted humanism, says, 
in the Republic, that in the ideal state, 
"Greeks should deal with barbarians as 
Greeks now deal with one another." If one 
remembers what occurred in the Peloponne- 
sian war — how Greek men voted to kill all the 
men of military age in a conquered Greek city 
and sell all the women and children into slav- 
ery — one will see that Plato's dream of hu- 
manity was not so very wide. 

From that time on, there has been further 
extension of the appreciation of the sacred- 
ness of life and of the consciousness of moral 
obligation toward other human beings. We 
are far from the end of the path. Our sym- 
pathies are still limited by accidents of time 
and place, race and color; but we have gone 
far enough to see what the end would be, were 
we to reach it: a sympathy so wide, an appre- 
ciation of the sacredness of life so universal, 
that each of us would feel the joy or sorrow 
of every other human being, alive to-day or 
to be alive to-morrow, as something like his 
own. Moreover, in all civilized society, we 
have gone far enough to renounce the right 



24 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

to private vengeance and adjustment of quar- 
rels: we live under established courts of law, 
with organized civil force to carry out their 
judgments. This gives relative peace and se- 
curity, and a general, if imperfect, applica- 
tion of the moral law. 



V 



THE PRESENT STATE OF INTERNA- 
TIONAL RELATIONS 

The astounding anomaly of modern civili- 
zation is the way we have lagged behind in 
applying to groups and nations of men the 
moral laws, universally recognized as binding 
over individuals. For instance, about twenty 
years ago we coined and used widely the 
phrase, '^soulless corporation," to designate 
our great combinations of capital in industry 
and commerce. Why was that phrase used so 
widely? The answer is illuminating: we took 
it for granted that an individual employer 
would treat his artisans to some extent as hu- 
man beings and not merely as cog-wheels in 
a productive machine; but we also took it 
for granted that an impersonal corporation, 
where no individual was dominantly responsi- 
ble, would regard its artisans merely as pieces 
of machinery, with no respect whatever for 
their humanity. 

25 



26 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

The supreme paradox, however, is in the 
relation of nations: it is there that we have 
most amazingly lagged behind in applying the 
moral laws universally accepted in the rela- 
tions of individuals. For instance, long before 
this War began we heard it proclaimed, even 
proudly, by certain philosophers, in more than 
one nation, that the state is the supreme spirit- 
ual unit, that there is no law higher than its 
interest, that the state makes the law and may 
break it at will. When a great statesman in 
Germany, doubtless in a moment of intense 
anger and irritation, used the phrase that has 
gone all across the earth, ''scrap of paper!' for 
a sacred treaty between nations, he was only 
making a pungent practical application of the 
philosophy in question. 

Do we regard self-preservation as the high- 
est law for the individual? Distinctly not. 
Here is a crowded theater and a sudden cry 
of fire, with the ensuing panic: if strong men 
trample down and kill women and children, 
in the effort to save their own lives, we regard 
them with loathing and contempt. On the 
other hand, it is just this plea of national self- 
preservation that the German regime has used 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 27 

in cynical justification of its every atrocity — 
the initial violation of Belgium, the making 
v/ar ruthlessly on civil populations, the atro- 
cious spying and plotting in the bosom of neu- 
tral and friendly nations, the destruction of 
monuments of art and devastation of the 
cities, fields, orchards and forests of northern 
France, and finally the submarine warfare on 
the world's shipping. No civilized human 
being would, for a moment, think of using the 
plea of self-preservation to justify comparable 
conduct in individual life. 

Consider international diplomacy: much of 
it has been merely shrewd and skillful lying. 
If you will review the list of the most famous 
diplomats of Europe for the last thousand 
years, you will find that a considerable portion 
of them won their fame and reputation by be- 
ing a little more shrewd and successful liars 
than the diplomats with whom they had to 
deal in other lands. In other words, their con- 
duct has been exactly on the plane that Ulysses 
represented in personal life, afar back in clas- 
sic antiquity. 

Take an illustration a little nearer home. 
If you were doing business on one side of the 



28 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

street and had two competitors in the same 
line, across the way, and a cyclone swept the 
town, destroying their establishments and 
sparing yours : you, as an individual, would be 
ashamed to take advantage of the disaster un- 
der which your rivals were suffering, using 
the time while they were out of business to 
lure their customers away from them and bind 
those customers to you so securely that your 
competitors would never be able to get them 
back. You would scorn such conduct as an 
individual; but when it comes to a relation of 
the nations: during the first two years of the 
War, from the highest government circles 
down to the smallest country newspaper, we 
were urged to take advantage of the disaster 
under which our European rivals were suffer- 
ing, win their international customers away 
from them and bind those customers to us so 
securely that Europe would never be able to 
get them back. Not that we were urged to in- 
dustry and enterprise — that is always right — 
but actually to seek to profit by the sufferings 
of others — conduct we would regard as utterly 
unworthy in personal life. 

If your neighbor were to say, "My personal 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 29 

aspirations demand this portion of your front 
yard," and he were to attempt to fence it in: 
the situation is unimaginable; but when a na- 
tion says, ''My national aspirations demand 
this portion of your territory," and proceeds 
to annex it: if the nation is strong enough to 
carry it out, a large part of the world ac- 
quiesces. 

The relations of nations are thus still largely 
on the plane of primitive life among individ- 
uals, or, since nations are made up of civil- 
ized and semi-civilized persons, it would be 
fairer to say that the relations of nations are 
comparable to those prevailing among indi- 
viduals when a group of men goes far out 
from civil society, to the frontier, beyond the 
reach of courts of law and their police forces: 
then nearly always there is a reversion to the 
rule of the strong arm. That is what Kipling 
meant in exclaiming, 

* 'There' s never a law of God or man runs north of fifty- 
three." 

That condition prevailed all across our 
frontier in the early days. For instance, the 



30 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

cattle men came, pasturing their herds on the 
hills and plains, using the great expanse of 
land not yet taken up by private ownership. 
A little later came the sheep men, with vast 
flocks of sheep, which nibbled every blade of 
grass and other edible plant down to the 
ground, thus starving out the cattle. What 
followed? The cattle men got together by 
night, rode down the sheep-herders, shot them 
or drove them out, or were themselves driven 
out. 

So on the frontier, in the early days, a weak- 
ling staked out an agricultural or mining 
claim. A ruffian appears, who is a sure shot, 
jumps the claim and drives the other out. It 
was the rule of the strong arm, and it was evi- 
dent on the frontier all across the country. 

This is exactly the state that a considerable 
part of the world has reached in international 
relationship to-day. Claim-jumping is still 
accepted and widely practised among the na- 
tions. That is, in fact, the way in which all 
empires have been built — by a succession of 
successful claim-jumpings. Consider the most 
impressive of them all, the old Roman em- 
pire. Rome was a city near the mouth of the 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 31 

Tiber. She reached out and conquered a few 
neighboring cities in the Latin plain, binding 
them securely to herself by domestic and eco- 
nomic ties. Then she extended her power 
south and north, crossed into northern Africa, 
conquered Gaul and Spain, swept Asia Minor, 
until a territory three thousand by two thou- 
sand miles in extent was under the sway of her 
all-conquering arm. 

What justified Rome, as far as she had justi- 
fication, was the remarkable strength and wis- 
dom with which she established law and order 
and the protections of civil society over all the 
conquered territory, until often the subject 
populations were glad they had come under 
the all-dominant sway of Rome, since their 
situation was so much more peaceful and 
happy than before. Such justification, how- 
ever, is after the fact: it is not moral justifi- 
cation of the building of the empire. That 
represented a succession of claim-jumpings. 

For an illustration from more modern his- 
tory, take the greatest international crime of 
the last five hundred years, with one exception 
— the partition of Poland. It is true the Po- 
lish nobles were a nuisance to their neighbors, 



32 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

ever quarreling among themselves, v^ith no 
central authority powerful enough to restrain 
them, but that did not justify the action taken. 
Three nations, or rather the autocratic sov- 
ereigns of those nations, powerful enough to 
accomplish the crime, agreed to partition Po- 
land among themselves. They did it, with the 
result that there are plenty of Poles in the 
world to-day, but there is no Poland. 

Consider the possession of Silesia by Prus- 
sia. Silesia was an integral part of the Aus- 
trian domain, long so recognized. Friedrich 
the Great wanted it. He annexed it. The 
deed caused him many years of recurring, dev- 
astating wars ; again and again he was near 
the point of utter defeat; but he succeeded in 
bringing the war to a successful conclusion, 
and Silesia is part of Prussia to-day. The 
strong arm conquest is the only reason. 

So is it with Germany's possession of Schles- 
wig-Holstein, with Austria in Herzegovina 
and Bosnia, France in Algiers, Italy in Tri- 
poli: they are all instances of claim-jumping, 
reprehensible in varying degrees. 

I suppose no thoughtful Englishman would 
attempt to justify, on high moral grounds, the 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 33 

building up of the British empire: for in- 
stance, the possession of Egypt and India by 
Britain. How does India happen to be a part 
of the British realm? Every one knows the 
answer. The East India Company was simply 
the most adventurous and enterprising trading 
company then in the world. It grew rich 
trading with the Orient, established the su- 
premacy of the British merchant marine, got 
into difficulties with French rivals and native 
rulers, fought brilliantly for its rights, as it 
had every reason to do, conquered territory 
and consolidated its possessions, ruling chiefly 
through native princes. It became so power- 
ful that it did not seem wise to the British gov- 
ernment to permit a private corporation to 
exercise such ever-growing political author- 
ity. It was regulated, and in the end abol- 
ished, by act of Parliament; its possessions 
were taken over by the Crown; the conquests 
were extended and completed, and India to- 
day is a gem in the crown of the British em- 
pire. 

What justifies Britain, as far as she has jus- 
tification, is the remarkable wisdom and gen- 
erosity with which she has extended, not only 



34 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

law and order and protection to life and prop- 
erty, but freedom and autonomous self-gov- 
ernment, to her colonies and subject popula- 
tions, with certain tragic exceptions, about as 
fast as this could safely be done. It is that 
which holds the British empire together. 
Great irregular empire, stretching over a large 
part of the globe: but for this it would fall to 
pieces over night. It would be impossible 
for force, administered at the top, to hold it 
together. The splendid response of her col- 
onies in this War has been purely voluntary. 
That Canada has four hundred thousand 
trained men at the front, or ready to go, is due 
wholly to her free response to the wise gener- 
osity of England's policy, and in no degree to 
compulsion, which would have been impossi- 
ble. This justification of the British empire 
is, nevertheless, as in the case of Rome, after 
the fact, and does not justify morally the 
building up of the empire. 

Our own hands are not entirely clean. It 
is true we came late on the stage of history, 
and, starting as a democracy, were instinc- 
tively opposed to empire building. Thus our 
brief record is cleaner than that of the older 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 35 

nations. Nevertheless, there are examples of 
claim-jumping in our history. The most 
tragic of all is a large part of our treatment 
of the American Indians. It is true, with 
Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, we tried to make 
every steal a bargain. Many an expanse of 
territory has been bought with a jug of rum. 
The Indian knew nothing about the owner- 
ship of land; we did. So we made the deed, 
and he accepted it. Then, to his surprise, he 
found he had to move off from land where 
for generations his ancestors had hunted and 
fought, with no idea of private ownership. 
So we pushed him on and on. Of late decades 
we have become ashamed, tried in awkward 
fashion to render some compensation for the 
wrongs done, but the larger part of the story 
is sad indeed. 

There is, of course, another side to all this: 
the more highly developed nations do owe 
leadership and service in helping those below 
to climb the path of civilization; but let one 
answer fairly how much of empire building 
has been due to this altruistic spirit, and how 
much to selfishness and the lust for power and 
possession. 



VI 



THE ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL 
RELATIONSHIP 

We have seen that all empires have been 
built up by a series of successful aggressions, 
and that claim-jumping still characterizes the 
relations of the nations. Nevertheless, there 
has been some progress in applying to groups 
and nations the moral principles we recognize 
as binding upon individuals. Consider again 
our internal life : it was twenty years ago that 
we coined and used so widely the phrase "soul- 
less corporations" for our great combinations 
of capital in industry. To-day that phrase is 
rarely heard. One sees it seldom even in the 
pages of surviving "muck-raking" magazines. 
Why has a phrase, used so widely in the past, 
all but disappeared? Again the answer is il- 
luminating: there has been tremendous growth 
in twenty years, on the part of our great cor- 
porations, in treating their employees as hu- 

36 



INTERNATIONAL ETHICS 37 

man beings and not merely as cog-wheels in a 
productive machine. When the greatest cor- 
poration in the United States voluntarily raises 
the wages of all its employees in the country 
ten per cent., five several times, within a few 
months, as the Steel trust has recently done, 
something has happened. It may be said, 
''they did it because it was good business": 
twenty years ago they would not have recog- 
nized that it was good business. It may be 
said, ''they did it to avoid strikes": twenty 
years ago they would have welcomed the 
strikes, fought them through and gained what 
selfish advantage was possible. The point is, 
there has been vast increase in the conscious- 
ness of moral responsibility on the part of cor- 
porations toward their artisans. This has 
been due partly to legislation, but mainly to 
education and the awakening of public con- 
science. If you wish to find the greatest arro- 
gance and selfishness now, you will discover 
it, not among the capitalists: they are timid 
and submissive — strangely so. You will find 
it rather in certain leaders of the labor move- 
ment, with their consciousness of newly- 
gained powers. 



38 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

Some growth there has been in the applica- 
tion of the same moral principles even to the 
relations of the nations. For instance: a hun- 
dred years ago the Napoleonic wars had just 
come to an end. In the days of Napoleon men 
generally gloried in war; to-day most of them 
bitterly regret it, and fight because they be- 
lieve they are fighting for high moral aims or 
for national self-preservation, whether they 
are right or wrong. 

When Napoleon conquered a country, often 
he pushed the weakling king off the throne, 
and replaced him with a member of his own 
family — at times a worse weakling. Think of 
such a thing being attempted to-day: it is un- 
imaginable, unless the worst tyranny on earth 
got the upper hand for the next three hundred 
years of human history. 

A more pungent illustration of progress is 
the feverish desire, shown by each of the com- 
batants in this world struggle, to prove that he 
did not begin it. Now some one began it. A 
hundred years ago belligerents would not have 
been so anxious to prove their innocence: then 
victory closed all accounts and no one went be- 
hind the returns. The feverish anxiety each 



INTERNATIONAL ETHICS 39 

combatant has shown to establish his inno- 
cence of initiating this devastating War is con- 
clusive proof that even the worst of them 
recognizes that they all must finally stand be- 
fore the moral court of the world's conscience 
and be judged. The same tendency is shown 
in the efforts of Germany — grotesquely and 
tragically sophistical as they are — to justify 
her ever-expanding, freshly-invented atroci- 
ties. At least she is aware that they require 
justification. 

This explains why we react so bitterly even 
on what would have been accepted a century 
ago. What was taken for granted yesterday is 
not tolerated to-day, and what is taken for 
granted to-day will not be tolerated in a to- 
morrow that maybe is not so distant as in our 
darker moments we imagine. 

What would be the conclusion of this pro- 
cess? It would be, would it not, the complete 
application to the relations of the nations, of 
the moral principles universally accepted as 
binding upon individuals? If it is true that 
the moral order of the universe is one and un- 
changing, then what is right for a man is right 
for a nation of men, and what is wrong for a 



40 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

man is wrong for a nation; and no fallacious 
reasoning should be allowed to blind us to that 
basic truth. 

This would mean the end of all diplomacy 
of lying and deceit. The relations of the na- 
tions would be placed on the same plane of 
relative honesty and frankness now prevailing 
among individuals : not absolute truth — few of 
us practice that — but that general ability to 
trust each other, in word and conduct, that is 
the foundation of our business and social life. 

It would mean the end of empire building. 
Those empires that exist would fall naturally 
into their component parts. If those parts re- 
mained affiliated with the central government, 
it would be only through the voluntary choice 
of the majority of the population dwelling 
upon the territory. Thus every people would 
be affiliated with the government to which it 
naturally belonged and with which it wished 
to be affiliated. 

It would mean finally a voluntary federa- 
tion of the nations, with the establishment of 
a world court of justice; but no weak-kneed, 
spineless arbitration court: rather a court of 
justice, comparable to those established over 



INTERNATIONAL ETHICS 41 

individuals, whose judgments would be en- 
forced by an international military and naval 
police, contributed by the federated nations. 

People misunderstand this proposal. They 
imagine it would mean the giving over of the 
entire military and naval equipment of each 
federated nation to the central court. Far 
from it: each nation would retain, for defense 
purposes, the mass of its manhood and the 
larger fraction of its limited equipment, while 
a minor fraction would be contributed to the 
world court. 

When this is achieved there will be, for the 
first time in the history of the world, the dawn 
of the longed-for era of universal and rela- 
tively permanent peace for mankind. 

It is a far-off dream, is it not? Let us ad- 
mit it frankly, and it seems further off than 
it did four years ago; for the approximations 
to it, achieved through international law, we 
have seen go down in a blind welter, through 
the invention of new instruments of destruc- 
tion and the willful perpetration of illegal 
and immoral atrocities in this horrible War. 

Nevertheless, it is not so far off as in our 



42 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

darker moments we fear. If this world War 
ends justly; which means if it ends so that the 
people dwelling on any territory are affiliated 
with the government to which they naturally 
belong and with which they wish to be affili- 
ated, the dream will be brought appreciably 
nearer. If the War ends unjustly, which 
means if it ends with the gratification of the 
ambitions of aggressive tyranny, the dream 
will be put remotely far off. If a peace is 
patched up meantime, with no solution, it will 
mean Europe sleeping on its arms, and the 
breaking out of the war with multiplied devas- 
tation within twenty years. That is why these 
blithely undertaken peace missions and other 
efforts at peace without victory, even when not 
cloaks for pro-German movements, are such 
preposterous absurdities or else play directly 
into the hands of tyranny. 

At best, however, the dream is a long way 
ahead. Men dislike to give up power, nations 
equally. It will take a long process of inter- 
national moral education to induce the nations 
to renounce their arbitrary powers, their right 
to adjust all their own quarrels, and lead them 



INTERNATIONAL ETHICS 43 

to enter voluntarily a federation under a world 
court of justice. This, nevertheless, is the 
hope of the world, toward which we should 
work with all our might. 



VII 

AMERICA'S DUTY IN INTERNA- 
TIONAL RELATIONS 

Since the world solution is, at best, so re- 
mote, our question is : what are we to do mean- 
time? Our entrance into the War partially 
answers the question. We have before us the 
immediate task of aiding in overthrowing 
autocracy and tyranny and of defending our 
liberties and those of the nations that stand for 
democracy. This is the first duty, but not the 
only one. 

More definitely than any other nation we 
have thrown down to the world the challenge 
of democracy. We have said, "Away with 
kings, we will have no more of them! Away 
with castes and ruling classes, we will have no 
more of them!" As a matter of fact, democ- 
racies have no rulers — the word survives from 
an older order of society — they have guides, 
leaders and representatives. If you wish to 

44 



AMERICA'S DUTY 45 

use the word, in a democracy every man is the 
ruler — and every woman too, we hope, before 
long. To this ideal we are committed and it 
carries certain obligations ; for every right car- 
ries a duty, and every duty, a right. Often the 
best way to get a privilege is by assuming a 
responsibility. That is a truth it would be 
well for the leaders of the feminist and labor 
movements to recognize. The obligations car- 
ried by the challenge of our democracy are 
clear. 

We Americans should have done, once and 
for all time, with the diplomacy of lying and 
deceit. Fortunately our recent traditions are 
in harmony with this demand ; but we should 
not depend upon the happy accident of an ad- 
ministration which takes the right attitude. It 
should be the open and universal demand of 
the American people that those who represent 
us shall place the relations we sustain to other 
nations permanently on the same plane of 
frank honesty, generally prevailing among in- 
dividuals. Incidentally, any politician or 
statesman who, at this heart-breaking crisis of 
the world's life, dares play party politics with 
our international relations, should be damned 



46 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

forever by the vote of the American people. 

Further, it is our duty to have done with all 
dream of empire building. It is not for us: 
let us abandon it frankly and forever. Those 
dependencies which have come to us through 
the accidents of our history should be granted 
autonomous self-government at the earliest 
moment at which they can safely take it over 
— which does not necessarily mean to-morrow. 
If they remain affiliated with us it should be 
only through the voluntary choice of the ma- 
jority of the population dwelling upon them. 

It is, moreover, our duty to lead the world 
in the effort to form a federation of the na- 
tions and establish the aforesaid world court 
of justice, with the international military and 
naval police to enforce its judgments. 

More than this is demanded: on the basis of 
the challenge of our democracy, it is our duty 
to rise to the point of placing justice higher 
than commercial interest. It is a hard de- 
mand; but, with the latent idealism in our 
American life, surely we can rise to it. For 
instance, the vexed puzzle of the tariff will 
never be justly and permanently settled, till it 
is settled primarily as a problem of moral in- 



AMERICA'S DUTY 47 

ternational relationship, and not as one merely 
of economic interest and advantage. 

For example, a tariff wall between the 
United States and Canada is as preposterous 
an absurdity as would be a long line of brist- 
ling fortifications along the three thousand 
and more miles of international boundary. 
We are not protecting ourselves from slave 
labor over there. They are not protecting 
themselves from slave labor here. Barring a 
few lines of industry, there are the same con- 
ditions of labor, production and distribution 
both sides of the line. The only reason for a 
tariff wall is their wish, or our wish, or the 
wish of each, to gain some advantage at the 
expense of the other party. Now every busi- 
ness man knows that any trade that benefits 
one and injures the other party to it is bad 
business, as well as bad ethics, in the long 
run. Good business benefits both traders all 

the time. 

On the other hand, when it comes to pro- 
tecting our labor from competition with slave 
labor in other quarters of the earth, we have 
not only the right, but the duty to do it. So 
when it is a matter of protecting our indus- 



48 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

tries from being swamped by the unloading of 
vast quantities of goods, produced under the 
feverish and abnormal conditions, sure to pre- 
vail in Europe after the War, we have again, 
not only the right, but the duty to do it. 

Finally, a still higher call is upon us: we 
must somehow rise to the point of placing hu- 
manity above the nation. It is true, "Charity 
begins at home," certainly justice should. 
One should educate one's own children, be- 
fore worrying over the children of the neigh- 
borhood; clean up one's own town, before 
troubling about the city further away. Often 
the whole is helped best by serving the part; 
but it is with national patriotism as it is with 
family affection. The latter is a lovely qual- 
ity and the source of much that is best in the 
world; but when family affection is an instru- 
ment for gaining special privilege at the ex- 
pense of the good of society, a means of at- 
taining debauching luxury and selfish ag- 
grandisement, it is an abomination. The man 
who prays God's blessing on himself, his wife 
and his children, and nobody else, is a mean 
man, and he never gets blessed — not from 
God. Similarly, the man who seeks the in- 



AMERICA'S DUTY 49 

terest of his own nation, against the welfare 
of mankind, who prays God's blessing only on 
his own people, is equally a mean man, and 
his prayer, also, is never answered from the 
Most High. The world has advanced too far 
for the spirit of a narrow nationalism. The 
recrudescence of such a spirit is one of the 
sad consequences of this world War. Only in 
a spirit of international brotherhood, in dedi- 
cation to the welfare of humanity, can democ- 
racy go towards its goal. 

These are the obligations following upon 
the challenge of democracy we have pro- 
claimed to the nations. 



VIII 

THE GOSPEL AND THE SUPERSTI- 
TION OF NON-RESISTANCE 

The first condition of fulfilling the respon- 
sibilities imposed upon us by the challenge of 
our democracy is, now and hereafter, readi- 
ness and willingness for self-respecting self- 
defense, defense of our liberties and of the 
principles and ideals for which we stand. 
There is much nonsense talked about non-re- 
sistance to evil. It is a lovely thing in certain 
high places of the moral life. It was well that 
Socrates remained in the common criminal 
prison in Athens and drank the hemlock poi- 
son ; but nine times out of ten it would have 
been better to run away, as he had an oppor- 
tunity to do. It was good that Jesus healed 
the ear of the servant of the high priest, — and 
good that St. Peter cut it off. 

In other words, acts of non-resistance and 
self-sacrifice are fine flowers of the moral life; 

50 



THEORY OF NON-RESISTANCE 51 

but you cannot have flowers unless their roots 
are below ground, otherwise they quickly 
wither. Thus, to have sound value, these acts 
of non-resistance and self-sacrifice must rest 
on a solid foundation of self-afBrmation and 
resistance to evil. 

As with the individual, so with the nation: 
there come high moments in a nation's life, 
when a strong people might resist and delib- 
erately chooses not to. As an illustration, take 
our Mexican problem. The announcement 
that under no circumstances would we inter- 
vene, may have led to misunderstanding. Our 
purpose to let the Mexican people work out 
their own problem may have been taken to 
mean that we would not justly protect our- 
selves, with consequent encouragement to bor- 
der raiding. Nevertheless, if there has been 
any error in handling the situation, it has been 
on the better side — on the side of patience, 
generosity, long-suffering, giving the other 
fellow another chance, and another and an- 
other, even though he does not deserve them. 
Now that is not the side on which human na- 
ture usually errs. The common temptation is 
to selfishness and unjust aggression. Since 



52 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

that is the case, if we cannot strike the just 
balance, it is better to push too far on the other 
side and avoid the common mistake. 

Suppose, after the War, Japan, alone or in 
conjunction with one or another European 
power, closes the door to China: one can 
imagine circumstances where we, with the 
right to insist that the door be kept open, and 
perhaps, by that time, something of the 
strength to enforce that right, might deliber- 
ately say, ''No, we will not resist." Not that, 
with our present situation, such action is de- 
sirable, but that one can imagine conditions 
arising where it might be the higher choice. 

Let me repeat that, for the nation as with 
the individual, these high moments must rest 
on something else. They are the high moun- 
tain peaks of the moral life; but detached 
mountain peaks are impossible, — except as a 
mirage. They must rest upon the granite 
foundation of the hills and plateaus below. 
So these high virtues of non-resistance, mag- 
nanimity and self-sacrifice must always rest 
upon the granite foundation of the masculine 
virtues of self-affirmation, endurance, hero- 
ism, strong conflict with evil. It takes strength 



THEORY OF NON-RESISTANCE 53 

to make magnanimity and self-sacrifice possi- 
ble, if their lesson is not lost. A weak man 
cannot be magnanimous, since his generosity 
is mistaken for servile cowardice. After all, 
the best time to forgive your enemy, for his 
good and yours, is not when he has his foot on 
your neck: he is apt to misunderstand and 
think you are afraid. It is often better to wait 
until you can get on your feet and face him, 
man to man, and then if you can forgive him, 
it is so much the better for you, for him and 
for all concerned. 

Thus there are two opposite lines of error 
in the moral life. The philosophy of the one 
is given by Nietzsche, while Tolstoy, in cer- 
tain extremes of his teaching, represents the 
other. Nietzsche, I suppose, should be re- 
garded as a symptom, rather than a cause of 
anything important; but the ancestors of 
Nietzsche were Goethe and Ibsen, with their 
splendid gospel of self-realization. Nietz- 
sche, on the contrary, with his contempt for 
the morality of Christianity as the morality 
of slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the 
blond brute striding over forgotten multitudes 
of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation 



54 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

apart — Nietzsche is self-realization in the 
mad-house. It has always seemed to me not 
without significance that his own life ended 
there. 

On the other hand, when Tolstoy responded 
to an inquirer that, if he saw a child being at- 
tacked by a brutal ruffian, he would not use 
force to intervene and protect the child: 
that, too, is non-resistance fit for the insane 
asylum. One of these is just as far from sane, 
balanced human morality as the other. 

It is a terrible thing to suffer injustice; it 
is far worse to perpetrate it. If one had to 
choose between being victim or tyrant, one 
would always choose to be victim: it is safer 
for the moral life and there is more recovery 
afterward. If, however, it is better to suffer 
injustice than to perpetrate it, better than 
either is to resist it, fight it and, if possible, 
overthrow it. 

It has been said so many times by extreme 
pacifists that even sane human beings some- 
times take it for granted, that ^'force never ac- 
complished anything permanent in human his- 
tory." It is false, and the reasoning by which 
it is supported involves the most sophistical of 



THEORY OF NON-RESISTANCE 55 

fallacies. All depends on who uses the force 
and the purpose for which it is used. The 
force employed by tyranny and injustice ac- 
complishes nothing permanent in history. 
Why? Because tyranny and injustice are in 
their very nature transient, they are opposed 
to the moral order of the universe and, in the 
end, must pass. On the other hand, the force 
employed on the part of liberty and justice has 
attained most of the ends of civilization we 
cherish to-day. The force of the million of 
mercenaries, collected through Asia and 
Africa by Darius and Xerxes, to overwhelm 
a few Greek cities, accomplished nothing per- 
manent in history; but the force of the ten 
thousand Athenians who fought at Marathon 
and of the other thousands at Salamis, saved 
democracy for Europe and made possible the 
civilization of the Occident. The force em- 
ployed by King Louis of France to support a 
tottering throne and continue the exploitation 
of the people by an idle and selfish aristocratic 
caste, accomplished nothing permanent in his- 
tory; but the force of those Frenchmen who 
marched upon Paris, singing the Marseillaise, 
made possible the freedom and culture of the 



56 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

last hundred years. The force employed by 
King George of England, to wring taxes with- 
out representation from reluctant colonies, ac- 
complished nothing permanent in history, but 
the force which, at Bunker Hill and Concord 
Bridge, ^'fired the shot heard round the 
world," achieved the liberty and democracy 
of the American continent. 

It may be freely admitted that all use of 
force is a confession of failure to find a bet- 
ter way. If you use force in the education 
of a child, it is such a confession of failure. 
So is it if force is used in controlling defec- 
tives and criminals, or in adjusting the rela- 
tions of the nations ; but note that the failure 
may be one for which the individual parent, 
teacher, society, state or nation is in no degree 
responsible. Force is a tragic weapon — and 
the ultimate one. 



IX 

PREPAREDNESS FOR SELF- 
DEFENSE 

Since force is still the weapon of interna- 
tional justice, readiness and willingness to use 
it for defense, when necessary, is then the first 
condition of fulfilling the aims and serving 
the causes for which America stands. In 
other words, since the relations of the nations 
are still so largely those of individuals under 
the conditions of frontier life, as with the hon- 
est man on the frontier, so for the self-respect- 
ing, peace-loving nation to-day, it is well to 
carry a gun and know how to shoot. 

Carrying a gun is a dangerous practice, for 
two reasons : it may go off in your pocket; you 
may get drunk and shoot when you ought not. 
Those are the only two rational arguments 
against national preparation for defense, in 
the present state of the world. Let us see. 
The gun may go off in your pocket: that is, if 

57 



58 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

a strong armament for defense is built up, 
there is always danger that it may be used in- 
ternally, against the people, unjustly. That, 
indeed, has been one of the curses of Europe 
for a thousand years. It is a grave danger, 
but recognizing it is partly forestalling it; 
moreover, we would better face that danger 
than one far worse. So with the other men- 
ace : you may get drunk and shoot when you 
ought not. Nations get drunk : they get drunk 
with pride, arrogance, aggressive ambition, 
revenge, even with panic terror, and so shoot 
when they should not. This, also, is a grave 
danger; but here, as well, recognizing it is 
part way forestalling it, and this danger, too, 
we would better face than one far more ter- 
rible. Moreover, it is armament for the grati- 
fication of aggressive ambition, and under the 
control of the arbitrary authority of a despotic 
individual or group, that tends to initiate war, 
not armament solely to defend the liberties of 
a people. 

Thus, under the conditions cited, it is well 
to be armed and prepared. If a wolf is at 
large, if a mad dog is loose, if a madman is 
abroad with an ax, it is the part of wisdom to 



PREPAREDNESS 59 

have an adequate weapon and be prepared to 
use it. If the Athenians had not resisted the 
hordes of Asia, what would have been the his- 
tory of Europe? If the French had not re- 
sisted tyranny and injustice in the Revolution, 
what would have been the civilization of the 
last hundred years? If the English colonists 
had not resisted taxation without representa- 
tion, what would be the present status of 
America? If the artisan groups had not 
united and fought economic exploitation, what 
would be their life to-day? If Belgium had 
not resisted Germany, what would be the fu- 
ture of democracy in Europe? Thus, now 
and after the War, the need is for all necessary 
armament for self-respecting self-defense and 
not an atom to gratify aggressive ambition. 
This does not mean that, once involved in war, 
the military tactics of democracy should be 
merely defensive. As has often and wisely 
been said, in war the best defense is a swift 
and hard attack. 

It is widely argued, however, since our aim 
is peace and a world-court of justice to settle 
the disputes among the nations, making gen- 
eral disarmament possible, should not one 



6o THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

great nation, fortunately free from the quar- 
rels of Europe, occupying the major portion 
of a continent, its shores washed by two great 
oceans, with peaceful friendship on the north 
and weak anarchy on the south — should not 
such a nation take the lead, disarm and set an 
example to mankind? It is a beautiful dream! 
Would that those who really believe in non- 
resistance to evil would be logical, and apply 
it to internal as well as external policy. What 
is a police force? It is a body of men, trained, 
employed and paid to use force in resisting 
evil. If you wish to try out non-resistance, 
why not let some city apply it? Let Chicago 
do it: abolish its police force and set the ex- 
ample to the rest of the benighted cities of the 
country. What would happen? As long as 
there are criminals in all cities of the land, 
how they would flock to that fat pasturage. 
What devastation of property, destruction of 
life, injury to innocent women and children! 
Until the best men of Chicago would get 
together, form a vigilance committee, shoot 
some of the criminals, hang others, drive the 
rest out; and Chicago would get back to law 
and order, with courts of justice and a regular 



PREPAREDNESS 6i 

police body, composed of men trained, em- 
ployed and paid to use force in resisting evil. 

The example of Canada and the United 
States is cited, and a noble example it is : three 
thousand and more miles of international 
boundary, with never a shining gun or brist- 
ling fortress on the entire frontier. A glorious 
example, prophetic of what is coming all over 
the world, perhaps more quickly than we dare 
hope to-day; but what made it possible? 
Agreement in advance, and that at a time 
when one of the parties was too weak to be 
feared. Canada is getting strong: she has at 
present four hundred thousand trained men 
at the front or ready to go. Before the War 
closes she will have over a half million. Now 
suppose Canada fortified: we would be com- 
pelled to, there would be no other way. 

Thus one nation cannot disarm while the 
others are strongly armed, and among them 
are those whose autocratic rulers and imper- 
ialistic castes are watching for signs of weak- 
ness in order to perpetrate international claim- 
jumping. 

It is true that, on the frontier, in the early 
days, there were individuals who went about 



62 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

unarmed among the gun men, did it success- 
fully, and some of them died peacefully in 
their beds: Christian ministers — sky-pilots, 
they were called. Please note, however, that 
the sky-pilot never had any money. He had 
no claims to be jumped. 

We are not sky-pilots — far from it. As to 
money: the wealth of the world has been flow- 
ing into our coffers in a golden stream, to the 
embarrassment of our financial institutions, to 
the exaltation of the cost of living to such a 
point that, with more money than we ever 
dreamed of having, we find it more difficult to 
buy enough to eat and wear. As for claims to 
be jumped: they are on every hand: Panama 
Canal, Hawaiian Islands, Philippine Islands, 
ports of New York and San Francisco, vast 
reaches of unprotected coast. No, we are not 
sky-pilots, we cannot claim exemption on that 
ground. 

Suppose, after the War, we attempted to 
disarm, without the protection of a world 
court and international police, while the other 
nations retained war armament. They, the 
victors and perhaps the defeated, would pos- 
sess a great army and navy, manned with sea- 



PREPAREDNESS 63 

soned veterans, and be burdened with an in- 
tolerable debt; for the War has gone too far 
for any one to be able to pay adequate indem- 
nity. We, rich, young, heedless, sure that no 
one on earth could ever whip us, chiefly be- 
cause no one worth while has ever seriously 
tried: suppose we were completely disarmed. 
It would require only a little meddling with 
Mexico or Brazil, and we should have to give 
up the Monroe Doctrine or fight. Well, per- 
haps we shall give it up : it has even been sug- 
gested in the halls of Congress that we should 
— to the shame of the suggester, be it said. 
People do not understand the Monroe Doc- 
trine: they talk of it as if it were a law. It is 
in no sense a law, but is merely a rather arro- 
gant expression of our desires. We said to the 
other nations: "We desire that none of you 
henceforth shall fence in any part of our front 
or back yard, or the front or back yard of any 
of our neighbors, dwelling on the North and 
South American continents." That is the 
Monroe Doctrine, and that is all that it is: an 
expression of our wishes. All very well if 
others choose to respect them, but suppose 
some one does not? Perhaps, as stated, we 



64 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

may abandon the Monroe Doctrine: that is 
the easiest way, and the easiest way, for a na- 
tion or an individual, is usually the way of 
damnation. Even so, suppose the nation in 
question to say, ^'My national aspirations de- 
mand the Panama Canal, the Philippine 
Islands, or Long Island and the Port of New 
York." Why not? The Atlantic Ocean is 
only a mill-pond. It is not half so wide as 
Lake Erie was fifty years ago, in relation to 
modern means of transportation and commu- 
nication. People say, ^'Do we want to give up 
our traditional isolation?" They are too late 
in asking the question: that isolation is irre- 
coverably gone. That should be now evident 
even to people dwelling in fatuously fancied 
security between the AUeghenies and the 
Rockies. We are inevitably drawn into re- 
lation with the rest of mankind. The question 
is no longer, '^Shall we take a part in world 
problems?", but 'What part shall we take?" 
The point is, that if, under the circum- 
stances cited, any one wished to do so, we 
could quickly be driven to such a condition 
of abject humiliation that we should be com- 



PREPAREDNESS 65 

pelled to fight. Now suppose, disarmed, we 
should enter the conflict utterly unprepared? 
The result would be, hundreds of thousands 
of young men, going out bravely in obedience 
to an ideal — untrained and half equipped — 
to be butchered, a humiliating peace, and an 
indemnity of many billions to be groaned un- 
der for fifty years. 

On the other hand, if we were adequately 
armed for defense, there would be much less 
temptation to any one to trouble us ; and if we 
were compelled to fight, would it not be bet- 
ter to fight reasonably prepared? 

There is a story, going the rounds of the 
press, about the bandit, Jesse James: telling 
how, on one occasion, he went to a lonely farm 
house to commandeer a meal. Entering, he 
found one woman, a widow, alone and weep- 
ing bitterly. He asked her what was the mat- 
ter, and she replied that, in one hour, the 
landlord was coming, and if she did not have 
her mortgage money, she would lose her little 
farm and home and be out in the world, shel- 
terless. The heart of the bandit was touched. 
He gave her the money to pay off the mort- 



66 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

gage, hid in the brush and held up the land- 
lord on the way back. 

Need the moral be pointed? We have been 
getting the mortgage money. During the first 
years of the War it rolled in, an ever-increas- 
ing golden stream, until we held a mortgage 
on numerous European nations. We have the 
mortgage money, but beware of the way back! 

Thus the agitation, in one nation, for dis- 
armament, unpreparedness and a patched up 
peace, while the other nations are armed and 
embittered, not only renders the situation of 
the one people critically perilous, but actually 
cripples its power to serv^ the cause of world 
peace and humanity. If only the peace-at- 
any-price people had to pay the price, one 
would be willing to wait and see what hap- 
pened; but they never pay it, they take to 
cover. It is those hundreds of thousands of 
splendid young men, going out blithely in 
obedience to duty, to be butchered, it is the 
millions of women and children, who cannot 
escape from a devastated area, who pay that 
price. 

Every people in the past that turned to 
money and mercenaries for defense has gone 



PREPAREDNESS 67 

down. No people ever survived that was un- 
able and unwilling to fight for its liberties and 
spend, if necessary, the last drop of its blood 
for the principles it believed. 



X 



RECONSTRUCTION FROM THE 

WAR 

We have seen how impossible it is to fore- 
cast the new world that will follow the War, 
we know merely that it will be utterly new. 
Nevertheless, the great tendencies already at 
work we can partly discern and recognize 
something of what they promise. It is well 
to try to see them, that we may be not too un- 
ready to welcome the opportunity and accept 
the burden of the world that is being born in 
pain. 

Peace and prosperity produce a peculiar 
type of conservatism. People are then rela- 
tively free in action and expression, things 
are going well with them, and they are in- 
stinctively inclined to let well enough alone. 
Thus in thought they tend to a conservative 
inertia. 

On the other hand, in periods of great 

68 



RECONSTRUCTION 69 

strain and suffering, as in war time, thought 
is stimulated, all ordinary views are broken 
down and the most radical notions are widely 
disseminated and even taken for granted by 
those who, shortly before, would have been 
scandalized by them. Action and certain 
phases of free speech are, in such a period, 
much more widely restrained by authority. 
There is a swift and strong development of 
social control, urged by necessity. 

Thus, in war time, there is the curious para- 
dox of ever widening radicalism in thought, 
with constantly decreasing freedom in action 
and expression. When the discrepancy be- 
comes too great, you have the explosion — 
Revolution. This cause hastened and made 
more extreme the Russian Revolution, which 
had been simmering for a century. It has not 
yet appeared in Germany because of the forty 
years of successful work in drilling the mind 
of the German people to march in goose-step ; 
yet the increasing signs of questioning the in- 
fallibility of the existing regime and system 
in Germany give evidence that there, too, the 
conflict is at work. 

With ourselves, the opposition appears, as 



70 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

yet, only in minor degree. Nevertheless, it is 
here. On the one hand, are the registration, 
conscription and espionage measures, the ef- 
fort to control news, the governmental super- 
vision of food supplies, transportation, pro- 
duction and corporation earnings, the war 
taxes. On the other hand, thought is so stimu- 
lated that everything is questioned: our poli- 
tical system, our social institutions — marriage, 
the family, education. As some one says, 
"Nothing is radical now." We probably shall 
escape a sudden revolution, but the conflict 
must produce profound readjustment in every 
aspect of our life; for thought and action must 
come measurably together, since they are re- 
lated as soul and body. 

There are singular eddies in the main cur- 
rent both ways. For instance, the exigencies 
and sufferings of war produce a reaction to- 
ward narrower, orthodox forms of religion 
and a harsher spirit of nationalism; while in 
fields of action apart from the struggle, free- 
dom and even license may increase, as in sex- 
relations. Nevertheless these cross-currents, 
while they may obscure, do not alter the main 



RECONSTRUCTION 71 

tendencies, which move swiftly and increas- 
ingly toward the essential conflict. 

Even before our actual entrance into the 
War, its profound influence upon both our 
thinking and our conduct and institutions was 
evident. Now that we are in the conflict that 
influence is multiplied. We are aroused to 
new seriousness of thought. The frivolity and 
selfish pleasure-seeking that have marked our 
life for recent decades are decreasing. We 
may reasonably hope that the literature of su- 
perficial cleverness and smart cynicism, which 
has been in vogue for the last period, will have 
had its day, that the perpetrators of such lit- 
erature will be, measurably speaking, without 
audience at the conclusion of the War. 

The philosophy of complacency, at least, 
will be at an end, and the world will face with 
new earnestness the problem of life. This 
generation will be tired, perhaps exhausted, 
by the titanic struggle; but youth comes on, 
fresh and eager, with exhaustless vital energy, 
and the generations to come will take the her- 
itage and work out the new philosophy. As 
Nature quickly and quietly covers the worst 
scars we make in her breast, so Man has a 



72 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

power of recovery, beyond all that we could 
dream. It is to that we must look, across the 
time of demoniac destruction. 

We may even dare to hope that the next 
half-century will see a great development of 
noble literature in our own land. War for 
liberty, justice and humanity always tends to 
create such a productive period in literature 
and the other fine arts. The struggle with 
Persia was behind the Periclean age in 
Athens. It was the conflict of England with 
the overshadowing might of Spain that so vi- 
talized the Elizabethan period. The Revolu- 
tion was behind the one important school of 
literature our own country has produced hith- 
erto. 

Since this War is waged on a scale far more 
colossal than any other in human history, and 
since liberty and democracy are at stake, not 
only in one land, but throughout the world 
and for the entire future of humanity, it is 
reasonable to expect that the stimulation to the 
creation of art and literature will be far 
greater than that following any previous 
struggle. Where the sacrifice for high aims 
has been greatest, the inspiration should be 



RECONSTRUCTION 73 

greatest, as in France. The literature cur- 
rently produced, as in the books of Loti, Mae- 
terlinck and Rolland, is scrappy and disap- 
pointing, it is true; but that is to be expected 
when the whole nation is strained to its last 
energy and gasping for breath, under the ti- 
tanic struggle, and is no test of what will be. 
In spite of the destruction of so large a frac- 
tion of her manhood, France will surely rise 
from the ashes of this world conflagration re- 
generated and reinspired. The pessimism of 
her late decades will be gone. The literature 
and other art she will produce will be instinct 
with new earnestness and exalted vision, and 
she may excel even her own great past. 

We too are awakening. Since the War be- 
gan, all over the United States, men and 
women have been thinking more earnestly and 
have been more willing to listen to the expres- 
sion of serious thought than ever before for 
the last quarter centuiy. Now that the hour 
of sacrifice has struck, this earnestness must 
greatly deepen. Perhaps we, too, may have 
our golden age of art 

The same inspiration carries naturally into 
the religious life. It is true, as we have seen. 



74 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

that there is a cross-current of reversion to 
narrower orthodoxy, caused by the War. The 
Gods of War are all national and tribal divini- 
ties. While they rule, the face of the God of 
Humanity is veiled. The Kaiser's possessive 
attitude toward the Divine is but the extreme 
case of what War does to the religious life. 
Even among ourselves the tendency shows in 
such phenomena as the current popular evan- 
gelism — an eloquent, if artfully calculated 
and vulgarized preaching of the purely per- 
sonal virtues, with an ignorance that there is a 
social problem in modern civilization, pro- 
found as that displayed by a mediaeval 
churchman. The evangelist's list of inmates, 
whom he relegates to the kingdom of the lost, 
makes the place singularly attractive to the 
lover of good intellectual society. 

Nevertheless, the reversion to narrower 
creeds but indicates the newly awakened hun- 
ger of the religious life. Men who sacrifice 
live with graver earnestness than those who 
are carelessly prosperous. Cynicism and pes- 
simism are children of idleness and frivolity, 
never of heroic sacrifice and nobly accepted 
pain. These latter foster faith in life and its 



RECONSTRUCTION 75 

infinite and eternal meaning. Thus, with all 
the tragic submerging of our spiritual herit- 
age the War involves, we may hope that it will 
cause a revival, not of emotional hysteria, but 
of deepened faith in the spirit, in the supreme 
worth of life, until at last we may see the dawn 
of the religion of humanity. 



XI 
THE WAR AND EDUCATION 

Equally far-reaching are the changes the 
War must produce in our education. Tempo- 
rarily, our higher institutions will be crippled 
by the drawing off of the youth of the land 
for war. This is one of the unfortunate sac- 
rifices such a struggle involves. We must see 
to it that it is not carried too far. One still 
hears old men in the South pathetically say, 
"I missed my education because of the Civil 
War." Let us strive to keep open our educa- 
tional institutions and continue all our cul- 
tural activities, in spite of the drain and strain 
of the War. For never was intellectual guid- 
ance and leadership more needed than in the 
present crisis. 

The paramount effect of the War on educa- 
tion is, however, in the multiplied demand 
for efficiency. This is the cry all across the 
country to-day, and, in the main, it is just. 

Our education has been too academic, too 

76 



THE WAR AND EDUCATION 77 

much molded by tradition. It must be more 
closely related to life and to the changed con- 
ditions of industry and commerce. Each boy 
and girl, youth and maiden, must leave the 
school able to take hold somewhere and make 
a significant contribution to the society of 
which he or she is an integral part. Voca- 
tional training must be greatly increased. The 
problems of the school must be increasingly 
practical problems, and thought and judg- 
ment must be trained to the solution of those 
problems. This is all a part of that socializa- 
tion of democracy which must be achieved if 
democracy is to survive in the new world fol- 
lowing the War. 

There is, nevertheless, an element of emo- 
tional hysteria in the demand for efficiency 
and only efficiency. Efficiency is too narrow a 
standard by which to estimate anything con- 
cerning human conduct and character. In 
the effort to meet and conquer Germany, let 
us beware of the mistake of Germany. One 
of the world tragedies of this epoch is the way 
in which Germany has sacrificed her spiritual 
heritage, first for economic, then for purely 
military efficiency. When we recall that 



78 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

spiritual heritage, as previously described, 
when we think of Schiller, Herder and Goe- 
the, Froebel, Herbart and Richter, Tauler, 
Luther and Schleiermacher, Kant, Fichte and 
Schopenhauer, Mozart, Beethoven and Wag- 
ner, we stand aghast at the way in which she 
has plunged it all into the abyss, — for what? 
Shall it profit a people, more than a man, if 
it gain the whole world and lose its own soul? 
In such a time, then, all of us who believe 
in the spirit must hold high the torch of hu- 
manistic culture. Education is for life and 
not merely for efficiency. Of what worth is 
life, if one is only a cog-wheel in the economic 
machine? It is to save the spiritual heritage 
of humanity that we are fighting, and it is that 
heritage that education must bring to every 
child and youth, if it fulfills its supreme trust. 
Education for the purposes of autocratic im- 
perialism seeks to make a people a perfect 
economically productive and militarily ag- 
gressive machine. Education for democracy 
means the development of each individual to 
the most intelligent, self-directed and gov- 
erned, unselfish and devoted, sane, balanced 
and effective humanity. 



XII 
SOCIALISM AND THE WAR 

One of the surprises of the War was the 
complete breakdown of international social- 
ism. Not only socialists, but those of us who 
had been thoughtfully watching the move- 
ment from without, had come to believe that 
the measure of consciousness of international 
brotherhood it had developed in the artisan 
groups of many lands, would be a powerful 
lever against war. We were wrong: the su- 
perficial international sympathy evaporated 
like mist under the rays of a revived nation- 
alism. The socialists fell in line, almost as 
completely as any other group, with the purely 
nationalist aims in each land. 

This must have gratified certain despots; 
for one cause of the War, not the cause, was 
undoubtedly the preference on the part of va- 
rious autocrats, to face an external war rather 
than the rising tide of democracy within the 

79 



8o THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

nation. Temporarily, they have been success- 
ful, but surely only for a brief time. The vic- 
tory of democracy will vastly accelerate the 
growth of the spirit of brotherhood through- 
out the world. 

The terrible waste of the War must of it- 
self produce a reaction of the people on kings 
and castes in all lands. The suffering that 
will follow the War, in the period of economic 
readjustment, will accentuate this. Surely the 
people, in England, France, America, Italy, 
Russia, and among the neutral nations, will 
strive that no such war may come again. Even 
in Germany, when the people find out what 
they have paid and why, inevitably they must 
struggle so to reform their institutions that 
no ruler or class may again plunge them into 
such disaster for the selfish benefit or am- 
bitions of that ruler or class. How our hearts 
have warmed to Liebknecht! 

The realignment of nations must work to 
the same end. War, like politics, makes 
strange bed-fellows. Germany and Austria, 
for centuries rivals, and, at times, enemies, we 
behold united so completely that it is difficult 
to imagine them disentangled after the War. 



SOCIALISM AND THE WAR 8i 

France and England, long regarding each 
other as natural enemies, are fused heart and 
soul. Strangest of all, we have seen England 
struggling to win for Russia that prize of Con- 
stantinople, which for generations it has been 
a main object of British diplomacy to keep 
from Russian grasp. Most impressive of all, 
has been the new consciousness of unity and 
common cause among the nations of the earth, 
and the groups within all nations, standing 
for democracy. 

Thus the tide, checked for a time, will in- 
evitably break forth with renewed force. It 
is probable that the next fifty years will be a 
period of great change — even of revolutions, 
peaceful or otherwise, throughout the earth. 

To understand the effect on the whole so- 
cialist movement, one must distinguish clearly 
the two contrasting types of socialism. It is 
the curse of the orthodox, or Marxian, type of 
socialism, that it was "made in Germany." Its 
economic state is modeled directly on the 
Prussian bureaucratic and paternalistic state. 
Its dream realized, would mean Prussian effi- 
ciency carried to the nth power, in a society 
of as merciless slavery as that prevailing 



82 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

among the ants and the bees. It is doubtless 
this characteristic that has made so many bu- 
reaucratic or orthodox socialists instinctively 
Pro-German in sentiment and sympathy dur- 
ing the War. 

The contrasting type of socialism is that 
which is really the full development of de- 
mocracy, its movement from a narrow individ- 
ualism to ever wider voluntary co-operation. 
It moves, not toward government ownership, 
but toward ownership by the people, of natu- 
ral monopolies. It means, not the turning over 
to a bureaucratic government, of plants and 
instruments of production, but the progres- 
sive cooperative ownership of them by the 
workers themselves. It will end, not in the 
overthrow of the capitalist regime, but in all 
workers becoming co-operative capitalists, 
and all capitalists, productive workers, since 
no idle rich — or poor, will be tolerated. Such 
socialism, if it be so called, will depend upon 
the highest individual initiative, the most vol- 
untary co-operation and will include the indi- 
vidualism which is the cherished boon of 
democracy. It is significant that those who 
represent this type of socialism and who think 



SOCIALISM AND THE WAR 83 

for themselves, are breaking away from the 
orthodox party, under the courageous lead- 
ership and example of John Spargo, in in- 
creasing numbers, since our entrance into the 
War. They are as instinctively American 
and democratic in sympathy, as those of the 
opposite type are Pro-German. 

Even in the most democratic countries, 
however, the War has caused a vast increase 
of the undesirable type of socialism: that is 
one of its temporary penalties. To carry on 
such a war successfully, it is necessary to mul- 
tiply the authority of the central government. 
That has been the experience of England, 
now being repeated here. Men, who were 
citizens of a democracy, become, as soldiers, 
and in part as workers, subjects of the gov- 
ernment in war. To some extent we are 
forced to imitate the tendencies we deplore 
and seek to overthrow in Germany, to be able 
to meet and defeat Germany. 

Even so, the difference is profound. The 
subordination to the government is, for the 
people as a whole, voluntary, achieved 
through laws passed by chosen represen- 
tatives of the people, and not by the arbitrary 



84 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

will of a kaiser and ruling caste. Thus the 
freedom, voluntarily relinquished for a time, 
can be quickly regained when the crisis is 
past. Subjects will become citizens again, 
when soldiers return to civil life. 

Nevertheless, there will be no return to the 
old, selfishly individualistic regime. The les- 
son of organized action will have been 
learned, and a vast increase of voluntary co- 
operation, that is, of the socialism that is true 
democracy may be anticipated as a beneficent 
result of the War. This will be one of the 
great compensations for the waste of our heri- 
tage, spiritual and material, through the War. 
The voluntary socialization of previously in- 
dividualistic democracy unll be the next great 
forward movement of the human spirit. 



XIII 

THE WAR AND FEMINISM 

Of all consequences of the War, perhaps 
none is more significant than its effect upon 
the position of women. Militarism and femi- 
nism are counter currents in the tide of his- 
tory. All recrudescence of brute force car- 
ries the subjugation of women. In the de- 
gree to which professional militarism prevails 
in any society, women are forced into hard 
industrial activities, despised because fulfilled 
by women. On the other hand, a group of 
carefully protected women is held apart as a 
fine adornment of life. Both ways militarism 
accentuates the property idea in reference to 
women: the one type, useful, the other, adorn- 
ing, property. The one shows in marriage by 
purchase, the other in the dowry system. It 
is hard to say which is more dishonoring to 
vv^omen. It would, perhaps, seem preferable 
and less offensive to be bought as useful, 

85 



86 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

rather than accepted with a money payment, 
as an adorning but expensive possession, 
where, as with the automobile, '4t is the up- 
keep that counts." Surely, however, either 
attitude is degrading enough. 

The accentuation, in the present War, of 
the notion of women as property, is evident 
in more brutal form in the horrors of rape, in 
the deliberate and organized use of women as 
breeders, with the same efficiency with which 
Germany breeds her swine. 

Nevertheless, here, too, strong counter cur- 
rents are at work. As this is a war of nations, 
not of armies, it is the whole people that, in 
each instance, has had to be mobilized and 
organized. In all the democracies women 
have voluntarily risen to this need, just as cit- 
izens have voluntarily become soldiers. Thus 
women, by the legion, are working in muni- 
tion factories, on the farms, in productive 
plants of every kind, in public service and 
commerce organizations. The noble way in 
which women have accepted the double bur- 
den has created a wave of reverent admira- 
tion throughout the world. Thus where pro- 
fessional militarism tends to despise the in- 



THE WAR AND FEMINISM 87 

dustrial activities into which it forces women, 
war for defense and justice causes reverence 
for the same socially necessary activities and 
for the women who so courageously under- 
take them for the sake of all. 

Moreover, the increased freedom of action 
for women will outlast its temporary cause. 
Once so admitted to new fields of industrial, 
business and professional activity, women can 
never be generally excluded from them again. 
Thus when the soldiers become citizens, many 
of the women will remain producers, work- 
ing beside men under new conditions of 
equality. 

The result, with the general stimulation of 
radical thinking that the War involves, will 
be a profound acceleration of the feminist 
movement throughout, at least, the democra- 
cies of the world. Already it is being recog- 
nized that all valid principles of democracy 
apply to women equally with men. Regene- 
rated, if chaotic, Russia takes for granted the 
farthest reaches of feminism. The regime in 
England, that bitterly opposed suffrage for 
women, is now voluntarily granting it before 
the close of the War. 



88 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

Thus the victory of the allied nations will 
mean the fruition of much of the feminism 
that is a phase of humanism. It will mean 
freeing women from outgrown custom and 
tradition, from unjust limitations in indus- 
trial, social and political life. It will mean 
men and women working together, on a plane 
of moral equality, with free initiative and vol- 
untary co-operation, for the fruition of de- 
mocracy. Just as that fruition will see the 
end of idle rich and poor, so there will be no 
more women slaves or parasites, none regard- 
ed or possessed as property, but only free hu- 
man beings, each self-directed and self-con- 
trolled, and responsible for his or her own 
personality and conduct. 



XIV 

THE TRANSFORMATION OF 
DEMOCRACY 

The nineteenth century was the period of 
rapid growth in adhesion to those ideals of 
democracy for which the War is being 
fought. It is not so well recognized that dur- 
ing the same hundred years democracy was 
so transformed as to be to-day a new thing 
under the sun. 

Up to the time of the French and Ameri- 
can revolutions democracy rested largely 
upon certain abstract ideas of human nature. 
Rousseau could argue that in primitive times 
men sat down together to form a state, each 
giving up a part of his natural right to a cen- 
tral authority, and thus justifying it. We now 
know that nothing of the kind ever happened, 
that society had undergone a long process of 
development before men began to think about 
it at all. We continue to repeat the splendid 

89 



90 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

phrases of the Revolutionary period, but we 
do not believe them — not as our ancestors be- 
lieved them. Instead of regarding all men as 
born free and equal, we recognize that free- 
dom is the end, rather than the beginning of 
a long process of development, while we see 
every kind of inequality among men, in 
health, natural gifts, temperament and char- 
acter. It may be said, our ancestors did not 
mean that all men were born really free and 
equal, but that it was the duty of a just state 
to guarantee them entire freedom of action 
and equality before the law and in opportu- 
nity of life. Even if we take this view, which 
is questionable, how far short we have fallen 
of realizing it, as yet, in our institutions. 

The point is, we have abandoned the ab- 
stract ideas of human nature, upon which de- 
mocracy previously depended. We test it by 
its results — not merely in economic efficiency 
and prosperity, but by its results in manhood 
and womanhood. If we continue to believe 
in democracy, in spite of its waste, cost and 
vulgarity, it is because we believe that only 
under free institutions is it possible to develop 
the most intelligent, earnest and worthy type 



MODERN DEMOCRACY 91 

of manhood and womanhood. Thus we view 
it in the opposite way from the thinkers who 
helped bring in the French and American 
revolutions, testing it by its results in char- 
acter and conduct. 

At least equally important is the extension 
of the area over which we apply the ideal of 
democracy. In all the older societies called 
by the same name, the rights of free citizen- 
ship were possessed by only a fraction of the 
population. Ancient Athens, for instance, we 
call a democracy, and it is true that, in the 
class of free citizens, democracy reached a 
more extreme form than in any modern so- 
ciety. That class, however, rested on the 
backs of a multitude of slaves. If we remem- 
ber that, in the best days of Athens, for every 
free citizen there were from four to ten slaves, 
not of alien race and color, but often of the 
same blood with their masters and, at times, 
better educated — men and women whom the 
fortunes of war had reduced to their abject 
condition — we shall see how far removed 
Athens was from a democracy in our modern 
sense. 

Of the free citizens, one half were not free 



92 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

at all. I refer, of course, to the women of 
antiquity. Where respectable, these were the 
head of the household slaves, scarcely re- 
moved from the condition of the latter. The 
few women who did achieve freedom of 
thought and action, and became the compan- 
ions of cultivated men — the Aspasias of an- 
tiquity — bought their freedom at a sad price. 

So Rome is called a republic, and it is true 
that, during the first half of her long history, 
freedom gradually broadened down from the 
patrician class to the plebeian multitude. 
When Rome reached out, however, to the 
mastery of the most impressive empire the 
world has seen, she never dreamed of extend- 
ing that freedom to the conquered popula- 
tions. If she did grant Roman citizenship to 
an occasional community, to enjoy the rights 
and exercise the privileges of that citizenship, 
it was necessary to journey to Rome. It was 
the city and the world: the city ruling the 
world as subject. 

The same principle holds with the repub- 
lics developing at the close of the middle age, 
in Italy, in the towns of the Hanseatic League 
and elsewhere. Always the freedom achieved 



MODERN DEMOCRACY 93 

was for a city, a group or a class, never for 
all the people. 

Our dream, on the contrary, is to take all 
the men and women in the land, ultimately in 
the world, and help them, through the free 
and cooperative activity of each with all the 
rest, on toward life, liberty, happiness, intel- 
ligence — all the ends of life that are worth 
while. If we demand life for ourselves, we 
ask it only in harmony with the best life for 
all. We want no special privilege, no benefit 
apart, bought at the price of the best welfare 
of humanity. "We," unfortunately, does not 
yet mean all of us, but it does signify an in- 
creasing multitude, rallying to this that is the 
standard of to-morrow. 

A third transformation, at least equally im- 
portant with these, is in the invention, for it is 
no less, of representative government. Politi- 
cal thinkers, such as John Fiske, have tried to 
make us understand what this invention 
means: we do not yet realize it. The devel- 
opment of representative government is the 
cause, first of all, of the tremendous expan- 
sion of the area over which we apply democ- 
racy. Plato, in the Laws, limits the size of 



94 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

the ideal state — the one realizable in this 
world — to 5040 citizens. Why? Well, the 
exact number has a certain mystical signifi- 
cance, but the main reason is, Plato could not 
imagine a much larger body of citizens than 
5000 meeting together in public assembly and 
fulfilling the functions of citizenship. 

We have extended democracy over a hun- 
dred millions of population, dwelling on the 
larger part of a continent; and if one travels 
North, South, East, West, to-day, one is im- 
pressed that, in spite of unassimilated ele- 
ments, everywhere men and women are proud, 
first of all, of being American citizens, and 
only in subordinate ways devoted to the sec- 
tion or community to which they belong. 
This has been made possible by the invention 
and development of representative govern- 
ment. 

That is not all: it is representative govern- 
ment that takes the sting out of all the older 
criticisms of democracy. Plato devotes one 
of the saddest portions of his Republic to 
showing how in a brief time, democracy must 
inevitably fall and be replaced by tyranny. 
With the democracy Plato knew this was true. 



MODERN DEMOCRACY 95 

It was impossible for Athens to protect and 
make permanent her constitution. She might 
pass a law declaring the penalty of death on 
any one proposing a change in the constitu- 
tion. It did no good. Let some demagogue 
arise, sure of the suffrage of a majority of the 
citizens: he could call them into public as- 
sembly, cause a repeal of the law, and make 
any change in the constitution he desired. 
There was no way to prevent it. 

It is the invention and development of rep- 
resentative government that has changed all 
that. We chafe under the slow-moving char- 
acter of our democracy — over the time it takes 
to get laws enacted and the longer time to get 
them executed. We may well be patient: this 
slow-moving character of democracy is the 
other side of its greatest safe-guard. It is be- 
cause we cannot immediately express in ac- 
tion the popular will and opinion, but must 
think two, three, many times, working through 
chosen and responsible representatives of the 
people, that our democracy is not subject to 
the perils and criticisms of those of antiquity. 

The voice of the people in the day and hour, 
under the impulse of sudden caprice or pas- 



96 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

sion, is anything but the voice of God: it is 
much more apt to be the voice of all the pow- 
ers of darkness. It is common thought, sifted 
through uncommon thought, that approaches 
as near the voice of God as we can hope to 
get in this world. It is not the surface whim 
of public opinion, it is its greatest common 
denominator that approximates the truth. 

It behooves us to remember this at a time 
when changes are coming with such swiftness. 
Our life has developed so rapidly that the old 
political forms proved inadequate to the so- 
lution of the new problems. As a practical 
people, we therefore quickly adopted or in- 
vented new forms. Doubtless this is, in the 
main, right, but we should understand clearly 
what we are doing. 

For instance, one of the great changes, re- 
cently inaugurated, is the election of national 
senators by popular vote. Our forefathers 
planned that the national upper house should 
represent a double sifting of popular opinion. 
We elected state legislatures; they, in turn, 
chose, the national senators: thus these were 
twice removed from the popular will. It 
proved easy to corrupt state legislatures; the 



MODERN DEMOCRACY 97 

national senate came to represent too much 
the moneyed interests; and so, through an 
amendment to the constitution, we changed 
the process, and now elect our senators by di- 
rect vote of the people. This makes them 
more immediately representative of the pop- 
ular will, and perhaps the change was wise; 
but we should recognize that we have re- 
moved one more safe-guard of democracy. 

A story, told for a generation, and fixed 
upon various British statesmen, will illustrate 
my meaning. The last repetition attributed 
it to John Burns. On one occasion, while he 
was a member of Parliament, it is said he was 
at a tea-party in the West End of London. 
The hostess, pouring his cup of tea, anxious 
to make talk and show her deep interest in 
politics, said, ''Mr. Burns, what is the use of 
the house of Lords anyway?" The statesman, 
without replying, poured his tea from the cup 
into the saucer. The hostess, surprised at the 
breach of etiquette, waited, and then said, 
''but Mr. Burns, you didn't answer my ques- 
tion." He pointed to the tea, cooling in the 
saucer: that was the function, to cool the tea 



98 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

of legislation. That was the function in- 
tended for our national senate. The trouble 
was, the tea of legislation often became so 
stone cold in the process that it was fit only for 
the political slop-pail, and that was not what 
we wanted. So we have changed it all, but 
one more safe-guard of democracy is gone. 

So with other reforms, loudly acclaimed, as 
the initiative and referendum. With the new 
problems and complications of an extraordin- 
arily developed life, it is doubtless wise that 
the people should be able to initiate legisla- 
tion and should have the final word as to what 
legislation shall stand. On the other hand, if 
we are not to suffer under a mass of hasty and 
ill-considered legislation, if laws are to stand, 
they must always be formulated by a body of 
trained legislators, and not by the changing 
whim of popular opinion. 

So with the recall, now so widely demanded 
in many sections of the country. In the old 
days, our candidates were most obsequious 
and profuse in promises to their constituents 
before election; but once elected, only too 
often they turned their backs on their constit- 



MODERN DEMOCRACY 99 

uents, went merrily their own way, making 
deals and bargains, in the spirit that ^'to the 
victor belong the spoils." Therefore we 
justly demanded some control of them, after, 
as before, election: hence the recall. Again 
the movement is right; but if the fundamen- 
tals of democracy are to be permanent, that 
body of men, concerned with the interpreta- 
tion of the constitution and the fundamental 
law of the land, must not be subject to the 
immediate whim of mob mind, and the power 
to recall those judges occupied with this task 
would be a graver danger than advantage. 
They will make mistakes, at times they will 
be ultra conservative and servants of special 
interests, but that is one of the incidental 
prices we have to pay for the permanence of 
free institutions. The problem is to keep the 
basic principles of democracy unchanged, the 
forms on the surface as fluid and adjustable 
as possible. 

It is these three transformations — the aban- 
donment of the old abstract notions and the 
testing of democracy by its results, the expan- 
sion of its application over the entire popu- 
lation, and the invention and development of 



loo THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

representative government — it is these three 
changes that make our democracy a new or- 
der of society, new in its problems, its men- 
aces, its solutions. 



XV 
DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

All just government is a transient device to 
make ordered progress possible. In the king- 
dom of heaven there would be no government, 
for if all human beings saw the best, loved the 
best and willed the best, the function of gov- 
ernment would be at an end. Obviously there 
is no hope or fear that we shall get into the 
kingdom of heaven soon, and the necessity for 
government will exist for an indefinitely long 
time. Nevertheless, government is due to the 
imperfection of human nature and, as stated, 
its aim is ordered progress. Progress without 
order is anarchy; order without progress is 
stagnation and death. 

It must frankly be admitted, moreover, that 
democracy is not the shortest road to good 
government nor to economic efficiency. That 
we recognize this as a people is proved by the 
drift of our opinion and of the changes in our 

lOI 



102 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

lesser institutions. Take, for instance, our 
city government. A few decades ago our 
cities were so notoriously misgoverned that 
they were the scandal of the world. Our 
boards of aldermen or councilmen, represent- 
ing ward constituencies, with all sorts of local 
strings tied to them, were clumsy and un- 
wieldy and easily subject to corruption. 

So, about twenty years ago, all across the 
country went the cry, "Get a good mayor, and 
give him a free hand." That is the way our 
great industries are conducted: a wise captain 
of industry is secured and given full control. 
Being a practical people, and imagining our- 
selves to be much more practical than really 
we are, we said, let us conduct our city busi- 
ness in the same way. Why not? Plato 
showed long ago that you can get the best 
government in the shortest time by getting a 
good tyrant, and giving him a free hand. 

There are just two objections. The first is 
incidental: it is exceedingly difficult to keep 
your tyrant good. Arbitrary authority over 
one's fellows is about the most corrupting in- 
fluence known to man. No one is great and 
good enough to be entrusted with it. Respon- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 103 

sible power sobers and educates, irresponsible 
power corrupts. Nevertheless we pay the 
price of this error and learn the lesson. 

The other objection is more significant. It 
is the effect on the rank and file of the citizen- 
ship, for the meaning of democracy is not im- 
mediate results in government, but the educa- 
tion of the citizen, and that education can 
come only by fulfilling the functions of citi- 
zenship. Thus it is better to be the free citi- 
zen of a democracy, with all the waste and 
temporary inefficiency democracy involves, 
than to be the inert slave of the most perfect 
paternal despotism ever devised by man. 
Thus the movement away from democratic 
city government is gravely to be questioned, 
no matter what economic results it secures. 

The same argument applies to more recent 
changes, as the commission form of city gov- 
ernment. As in the previous case, reacting 
upon the scandalous situation, we said, ^^Let 
us choose the three to ^yq best men in the com- 
munity, and let them run the city's business 
for us." Nearly every time this change has 
been made, the result has been an immediate 
cleaning up of the city government; but why? 



I04 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

Chiefly because "a new broom sweeps clean," 
— not so much for the reason that it is new, 
as because you are interested in the instru- 
ment. You can get a dirty room remarkably 
clean with an old broom, if you will sweep 
hard enough. The cleaning up is due, not 
primarily to the instrument, but to the hand 
that wields it. 

To speak less figuratively: the cleaning up 
of the city government with the inauguration 
of the commission system, came because the 
change was made by an awakening of the 
good people of the community. Good people 
have a habit, however, of going to sleep in an 
astoundingly short time; but the gang never 
sleeps. Now suppose, while the good people 
are dozing in semi-somnolence, assured that 
the new broom will sweep of itself, the gang 
gets together and elects the three to five worst 
gangsters in the city to be the commission? 
Is it not evident that the very added efficiency 
of the instrument means greater graft and cor- 
ruption? 

Equally the argument applies to the most 
recent device suggested — the city manager 
plan. As we have largely taken our schools 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 105 

out of politics, and have a non-partisan edu- 
cational expert as superintendent, so it is sug- 
gested we should conduct our city business. 
Again, suppose the gang appoints the city 
manager: he will be an expert in graft, rather 
than in government. 

The moment a people gets to trusting to a 
device it is headed for danger. There is just 
one safe-guard of democracy, and that is to 
keep the good people awake and at the task 
all the time. Some instruments are better and 
some are worse, but the instrument never does 
the work, it is the hand and brain that wield 
it. 

If there is one field where we could reason- 
ably expect to find pure democracy, it is in 
our higher educational institutions. In a col- 
lege or university, where a group of young 
men and women, and a group of older men 
and women are gathered apart, out of the se- 
verer economic struggle, dedicated to ideal 
ends: there, surely, we could expect pure de- 
mocracy in organization and relationship ; yet 
the tendency has been steadily toward autoc- 
racy. One can count the fingers of both hands 
and not cover the list of college and univer- 



io6 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

sity presidents who have taken office during 
the last fifteen years, only on condition that 
they have complete authority over the educa- 
tional policy of the institution, and often over 
its financial policy as well. The reason is ob- 
vious: we run a railroad efficiently by getting 
a good president and giving him arbitrary 
control; why not a university? 

There are just the two objections cited 
above: even in a university, it is difficult to 
keep your tyrant good. This, again, is the 
minor objection. The real evil is in the ef- 
fect upon the rank and file of those governed 
by the autocrat. There are men in university 
faculties to-day who say, privately, that if 
they could get any other opportunity, they 
would resign to-morrow, for they feel like 
clerks in a department store, with no oppor- 
tunity to help determine the educational pol- 
icy of the institutions of which they are inte- 
gral parts. 

The German university, under all the au- 
tocracy and bureaucracy of the German state, 
is more democratic in its organization than 
our own. Its faculty is a self-governing body, 
electing to its own membership. The Rec- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 107 

torship is an honor conferred for the year 
on some faculty member for superior worth 
and scholarship. Each member of the faculty 
may thus feel the self-respect and dignity, re- 
sulting from the power and initiative he pos- 
sesses as a free citizen of the institution. 

Let me suggest what would be the ideal 
democratic organization of a college or uni- 
versity. Why not apply the same division 
of functions of government that has proved so 
successful in the state? The board of Trus- 
tees is the natural judiciary; the President, 
the executive. The faculty is the legislative 
body, with the student body as a sort of lower 
house, cooperating in enacting the legislation 
for its own government. Where has such a 
plan been tried? 

If the primary purpose of democracy is 
thus, not immediate results in government, 
but the education of the citizen, on the other 
hand, democracy rests, for its safety and prog- 
ress, on the ever better education of the citi- 
zen. Under the older forms of human so- 
ciety, laws may be passed and executed that 
are far in advance of public opinion. That 
cannot be done in a democracy. The law may 



io8 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

be a slight step in advance, and so perhaps 
educate public opinion to its level; but if it 
goes beyond that step, after the first flurry of 
interest in the law is past, it remains a dead 
letter on the statute books — worse than use- 
less, because cultivating that dangerous disre- 
spect for all law, which we have seen growing 
upon us as a people. 

Thus from either side, the problem of de- 
mocracy is a problem of education. It rests 
upon education, its aim is education. In a de- 
mocracy, the supreme function of the state is, 
not to establish a military system for defense, 
or a police system for protection, it is not the 
enforcement of public and private contract: 
it is to take the children and youth of each 
generation and develop them into men and 
women able to fulfill the responsibility and 
enjoy the opportunity of free citizenship in a 
free society. 



XVI 

MENACES OF DEMOCRACY 

Since modern democracy is a new thing 
under the sun, so its menaces are new, or, if 
old, they take misleadingly new forms. For 
instance, the greatest danger in the path of 
our democracy is the world-old evil of selfish- 
ness, but it does take surprisingly new form. 
It is not aggressive selfishness that we have 
primarily to dread. There are those, it is 
true, who believe we may soon be endangered 
by the ambitions of some arrogant leader in 
the nation. The fear is unwarranted, for our 
people are still so devoted to the fundamen- 
tal principles of democracy, that if any leader 
were to take one clear step toward over-riding 
the constitution and making himself despot, 
that step would be his political death-blow. 
No, we are not yet endangered by the aggres- 
sive ambitions of those at the front, but we are 
in grave danger from the negative selfishness 

109 



no THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

of indifference, shown in its worst form by 
just those people who imagine they are good 
because they are respectable, whereas they 
may be merely good — for nothing. 

Plato argued that society could never have 
patriotism in full measure until the family 
was abolished. A singular notion that any 
school boy to-day can readily answer, yet here 
is the curious situation. Family life, among 
ourselves, in its better aspects, has reached a 
higher plane than ever before in any people. 
More marriages are made on the only decent 
basis of any marriage. This is the woman's 
land. Children have their rights and priv- 
ileges, even to their physical, mental and 
moral detriment. It is here that men most 
willingly sacrifice for their families, slaving 
through the hot summer in the cities, to send 
wife and children to the seashore or the moun- 
tains; yet it is just here that men most readily 
unhinge their consciences when they turn 
from private to public life. 

Some cynic has said that there is not an 
American citizen who would not smuggle to 
please his wife. Of course the statement is 



MENACES OF DEMOCRACY iii 

not true, but if you have ever crossed the ocean 
on a transatlantic liner, and watched the de- 
vices to which ordinarily decent men — men 
who would be ashamed to steal your pocket 
handkerchief or to lie to you as an individual 
— will resort, in order to lie to the govern- 
ment or steal from the government, you begin 
to wonder if the cynic was not right. The 
law, obviously, may be unjust: if so, protest 
against it and seek to have it changed, but 
while it is the law, does it not deserve your 
respectful obedience, unless you would add to 
the dangerously growing disrespect for all 
law? 

Next to the menace of selfishness is that 
of ignorance, and this, too, takes confusingly 
new form. It is not ignorance of scientific 
fact and law, dangerous as that is, that threat- 
ens, but ignorance of what our institutions 
mean, of what they have cost, of the ideal for 
which we stand among the nations. The ce- 
lerity with which, even during the past two 
decades, the younger generation has aban- 
doned old standards and ideals, is an ominous 
illustration. It is true: 



112 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

^'New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient 

goods uncouth; 
'They must upward still, and onward, who would keep 

abreast of Truth." 



Those words of Lowell's are as fully appli- 
cable to the present crisis, as to that for which 
Lowell wrote them; but to give up the past, 
without knowing that you are letting go, is 
surely not the part of wisdom 

A third menace shows in that fickleness of 
temper and false standard of life that cause us 
to admire the wrong type of leader. Prob- 
ably one half of all the attacks on men of un- 
usual wealth and success come from other 
men, who would like to be in the same situa- 
tion with those they attack, and have failed of 
their ambition. Part of the attack is sincere, 
no doubt, but if you assumed that all the abuse 
heaped upon conspicuous men came from 
moral conviction, you would utterly misread 
the situation. 

On the other hand, men of moral excellence 
make us ashamed. Now it takes a rarely 
magnanimous spirit to be shamed and not re- 
sent it. We are apt to feel that, if we can pull 



MENACES OF DEMOCRACY 113 

another down, we raise ourselves. To realize 
this, consider the growl of joy that comes 
from the worse sort of citizen and newspaper 
when some public leader is caught in a pri- 
vate scandal. As if pulling him down, raised 
us! We are all tarred with his disgrace. 
There are, indeed, two ways of stating the 
ideal of democracy: you can say, ''I am just 
as good as any one else," which in the first 
place, is not true, and, in the second, would 
be unlovely of you to express, were it true. 
You can say, on the contrary, '^Every other 
human being ought to have just as good a 
chance as I have," which is right; and yet you 
will hear the ideal of democracy phrased a 
dozen times the first way, where it is expressed 
once in the second form. 

That democracies are fickle is one of the 
oldest criticisms upon them. We had thought 
that we were not subject to that criticism, and 
in the old days we were not. We had the 
countr}/ debating club and the village lyceum. 
We were an agricultural people, sober and 
slow-moving. We had few books, they were 
good books and we read them many times. 
We had few newspapers, we knew the men 



114 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

who wrote in them, and when we read an edi- 
torial, our mind was actively challenged by 
the sincere thinking of another mind. 

To-day, everywhere, we have moved into 
the cities. The strength of the country-side 
is sobriety and slow incubation of the forces 
of life. Its vice is stupidity. The strength 
of the city is keen wittedness, versatility, 
quick response. Its vice is fickleness, morbid- 
ity, exhaustion. We have our great blanket 
sheet newspapers, representing a party, a 
clique, a financial interest, with writers lend- 
ing their brains out, for money, to write edi- 
torials for causes in which they do not believe. 
We have the multitude of books, incessantly 
and hastily produced; we read much, and 
scarcely think at all. We have got rid of the 
old '^three decker" novel, reduced it to a 
single volume, and then taken out the climax 
of the story, publishing it in the corner of the 
daily newspaper, as the short story of the day, 
so that he who runs may read. If he is a wise 
man he will run as fast as he can and not read 
that stufif at all. We have our ever increasing 
"movies," with their incessant titillation of 
the mind with swift passing impressions, as 



MENACES OF DEMOCRACY 115 

disintegrating to intellectual concentration, as 
they are injurious to the eyes. The result of 
it all is an increasing fickleness of temper, so 
that the same people who shout most loudly 
when the popular hero goes by, the next week 
cover his very name with vituperation and 
abuse, if he offends their slightest whim. 

This evil breeds another: fickleness in the 
people means demagoguery in the leader, in- 
evitably. We have said to our public men — 
not in words, but by the far more impressive 
language of our conduct — ^^get money, power, 
success, and we will give you more money, 
power and success, and not ask you how you 
got them nor what ends you serve in using 
them.'' That so many have refused the bribe 
is to their credit, not ours ; we have done what 
we could to corrupt them. 

Finally, we are the most irreverent people 
in the world. We believe in youth, we scorn 
age. We have splendid enthusiasm, we do not 
know what wisdom means. One hears college 
presidents say — half jokingly, of course — that 
there is no use appointing a man over thirty 
to the faculty these days. So one hears Chris- 
tian ministers, in those denominations where 



ii6 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

the minister is called by the particular church, 
say there is no use trying to get another call 
after one is fifty! Of course, it is not true, but 
it is true enough to be a serious criticism upon 
us. For what other vocation is there where 
the mellowness that comes only from time and 
long experience, from presiding at weddings 
and standing beside open graves, sharing the 
joys and sorrows of innumerable persons, is so 
indispensable, as in the pastor, the physician 
of the spirit? Still, we will turn out some 
wise, shy, mellow old man, just ripened to the 
point of being the true minister to the souls of 
others, and replace him with a recent grad- 
uate of a theological school, because the latter 
can talk the language of the higher criticism 
or whatever else happens to interest us for the 
moment. Obviously, we pay the price, but 
think what it indicates of our civilization. 



XVII 
THE DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY 

We have seen that the gravest menaces of 
democracy are the faults in mind and charac- 
ter in the multitude. Selfishness, fickleness, 
ignorance, irreverence in the people, with 
demagoguery in the leader — these are the 
menaces of American democracy. How then 
can the people be trusted, since democracy de- 
pends upon trusting them? This is an old in- 
dictment, searching to the very heart of de- 
mocracy. Plato made it of ancient Athens, 
while, more recently and trenchantly, Ibsen 
has made it for all modern society. 

The argument runs thus : democracy means 
the rule of the majority. Well, there are more 
fools than wise men in the world, more ignor- 
ant than intelligent. Thus the rule of the ma- 
jority must mean the rule of the fools over the 
wise men, of the ignorant over the intelligent. 

Such is the significant indictment, and we are 

117 



ii8 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

compelled to admit that our political life is 
filled with illustrations that would seem to 
substantiate it. The ward bosses, the dema- 
gogues and grafters who are given power by 
the multitude, one campaign after another, 
would seem to justify the pessimism of Plato 
and Ibsen. 

Is there not, however, a subtle fallacy in 
the very phrasing of the indictment? The 
majority does not "rule": it elects representa- 
tives who guide. That is something entirely 
different. When the worst is said of them 
those representatives of the people are dis- 
tinctly above the average of the majorities 
electing them. Take the roll of our presi- 
dents, for instance. With all the corruption 
and vulgarity of our national politics, that 
list, from Washington, through such altitudes 
as Jefferson and Lincoln, to the present occu- 
pant of the White House, is superior to any 
roster of kings or emperors in the history of 
mankind. 

What does this mean? It means that the 
hope of democracy is the instinctive power in 
the breast of common humanity to recognize 
the highest when it appears. Were this not 



DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY 119 

true, democracy would be the most hopeless 
of mistakes, and the sooner we abandoned it, 
with its vulgarity and waste, the better it 
would be for us. The instinctive power is 
there, however: to recognize, not to live, the 
highest. 

How many have followed the example of 
Socrates, remaining in prison and accepting 
the hemlock poison for the sake of truth? Yet 
all who know of him thrill to his sacrifice. 
Of all who have borne the name, Christian, 
how many have followed consistently the foot- 
steps of Jesus and obeyed literally and un- 
varyingly the precepts of the Sermon on the 
Mount? Of the millions, perhaps ten or 
twenty individuals — to be generous- in our 
view; but all the world recognizes him. 

Here, then, is the hope that takes the sting 
from the indictment of Plato, Ibsen and how 
many other critics of democracy. Plato said, 
"Until philosophers are kings, . . . cities 
will never have rest from their evils, — no, nor 
the human race, as I believe." Once, perhaps 
once only, Plato's dream was realized: in that 
noblest of philosopher emperors, wholly dedi- 
cated to the welfare of the world he ruled 



I20 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

with autocratic power; yet the soul of Marcus 
Aurelius was burdened with an impossible 
task. It is one of the tragic ironies of history 
that, in this one realization of Plato's lofty 
dream, the noble emperor could postpone, he 
could not avert, the colossal doom that threat- 
ened the world he ruled. So he wrapped his 
Roman cloak about him and lay down to sleep, 
with stoic consciousness that he had done his 
part in the place where Zeus had put him, but 
relieved that he might not see the disaster he 
knew must swiftly come. 

How different our dream: it is no illusion 
of a happy accident of philosopher kings. 
We want no arbitrary monarchs, wise or bru- 
tal: from the noblest of emperors to the 
butcher of Berlin, we would sweep them all 
aside, to the ash-heap of outworn tools. Our 
dream is the awakening and education of the 
multitude, so that the majority will be able 
and glad to choose, as its guides, leaders and 
representatives, the noblest and best. When 
that day comes, there will be, for the first time 
in the history of mankind, the dawn of a true 
aristocracy or rule of the best; and it will 
come through the fulfillment of democracy. 



DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY 121 

A long and troubled path, with many faults 
and evils meantime? Yes, but not so hope- 
lessly long, when one considers the ages of 
slow struggle up the mountain and the 
swiftly multiplying power of education over 
the mind of all. 



XVIII 

PATERNALISM VERSUS DEMOC- 
RACY 

The contrast between paternalism and de- 
mocracy in aim and method is thus extreme. 
Paternalism seeks directly organization, or- 
der, production and efficiency, incidentally 
and occasionally the welfare of the subject 
population. Democracy seeks directly the 
highest development of all men and women, 
their freedom, happiness and culture, in the 
end it hopes this will give social order, good 
government and productive power. It is will- 
ing, meantime, to sacrifice some measure of 
order for freedom, of good government for 
individual initiative, of efficiency for life. 
Paternalism seeks to achieve its aims, quickly 
and effectively, through the boss's whip of 
social control. Democracy works by the 
slower, but more permanently hopeful path of 
education, never sacrificing life to material 

122 



PATERNALISM 123 

ends. Paternalism ends in a social hierarchy, 
materially prosperous, but caste-ridden and 
without soul. Democracy ends in the abolish- 
ment of castes, equality of opportunity, with 
the freest individual initiative and finest flow- 
ering of the personal spirit. Which shall it 
be: God or Mammon, Men or Machines? 

There is no doubt that efficiency can be 
achieved most quickly under a well-wielded 
boss's whip, but at the sacrifice of initiative 
and invention. Moreover, remove the whip, 
and the efficiency quickly goes to pieces. On 
the other hand, the efficiency achieved by vol- 
untary effort and free cooperation comes 
much more slowly, but it lasts. Moreover, it 
develops, hand in hand, with initiative and 
invention. 

The negro, doubtless, has never been so 
generally efficient as before the civil war, in 
the South, under the overseer's whip; yet 
every negro who, to-day, has character enough 
to save up and buy a mule and an acre of 
ground, tills it with a consistent and perman- 
ent effectiveness of which slave labor is never 
capable. In the one case, moreover, there is 



124 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

the average economic result, in the other, the 
gradual development of manhood. 

Organize a factory on the feudal lines so 
prevalent in current industry. Get a strong, 
dominating superintendent and give him auto- 
cratic authority. Quickly he will show re- 
sults. Always, however, there is the danger 
of strikes, and if the strong hand falters, the 
organization disintegrates. On the other 
hand, let a corporation take its artisans into 
its confidence, give each a small proportionate 
share in the annual earnings. Each worker 
will feel increasingly that the business is his 
business. He will take pride in his accom- 
plishment. Gradually he will attain effi- 
ciency, and work permanently, without over- 
sight, with a consistent earnestness no boss's 
whip ever attained. 

The experience of the National Cash Reg- 
ister Company at Dayton, Ohio, proves this. 
The experiments of Henry Ford are a step 
toward the same solution. So, in lesser meas- 
ure, is the plan of the Steel trust to permit 
and encourage its employees to purchase an- 
nually its stock, somewhat below the current 



PATERNALISM 125 

market price, giving a substantial bonus if 
the stock is held over ten years. 

If you wish an illustration on a larger scale, 
consider the mass formation tactics of the Ger- 
man soldiers, in contrast to the individual 
courage, initiative and action of the French. 
There are the two types of efficiency in sheer- 
est contrast, but beyond is always the question 
of their effect on manhood. France has saved 
and regenerated her soul ; but Germany — ? ) 

Further, the breakdown of paternalistically 
achieved efficiency has been evident in Ger- 
many's utter failure to understand the mind 
of other peoples, particularly of democracies. 
She had voluminous data, gathered by the 
most atrociously efficient spy system ever de- 
veloped, yet she utterly misread the mind of 
France, England and the United States. The 
same break-down is evident in Germany's fail- 
ure in colonization in contrast to England's , 
success. --^ 

For offensive war, it must be admitted, the 
efficiency under the boss's whip will go fur- 
ther. For defensive war, or war for high 
moral aims, it is desirable that the individual 
soldier should think for himself, respond to 



126 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

the high appeal. Thus for such warfare the 
efficiency of voluntary effort and cooperation 
is superior. An autocracy would better rule 
its soldiers by a military caste; there can be 
no excuse for such in a democracy. Thus, 
the utmost possible fraternization of officers 
and men is desirable, and social snobbery, the 
snubbing of officers who come up from the 
ranks, and other anachronistic survivals, 
should be stamped out, as utterly foreign to 
what should be the spirit of the military arm 
of democracy. 

Further, in estimating the two types, one 
must remember that paternalism may exercise 
its power in secret and that it accomplishes 
much in the dark. Democracy, on the other 
hand, is afflicted and blessed with pitiless pub- 
licity. Thus its evils are all exposed, it 
washes all its dirty linen in public; but the 
main thing is to get it clean. 

When it comes to invention and initiative, 
as already indicated, democracy has the ad- 
vantage, immediately, as in the long run. We 
are the most inventive people on earth, and 
that quality is a direct result of our demo- 
cratic individualism. It is a significant fact 



PATERNALISM 127 

that most of the startling inventions used in 
this War were made in America — but devel- 
oped and applied in Germany, There, again, 
are evident the contrasting results of the two 
types of social organization. The indefatig- 
ably industrious and docile German mind can 
work out and apply the inventions furnished 
it, with marvelous persistency and effective- 
ness, under paternal control. We have the 
problem of achieving by voluntary effort and 
cooperation a persistent thoroughness in 
working out the ideas and inventions that 
come to us in such abundant measure. 
The path of democracy is education. 



XIX 

THE SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY 

When we say that the path of democracy 
is education, we do not mean that there is an 
easy solution of its problem. There is no 
patent medicine we can feed the American 
people and cure it of its diseases. There is 
no specific for the menaces that threaten. 
Eternal vigilance and effort are the price, not 
only of liberty, but of every good of man. 
Let things alone, and they get bad; to keep 
them good, we must struggle everlastingly to 
make them better. Leave the pool of politics 
unstirred by putting into it ever new individ- 
ual thought and ideal, and how quickly it be- 
comes a stagnant, ill-smelling pond. Leave a 
church unvitalized, by ever fresh personal 
consecration, and how quickly it becomes a 
dead form, hampering the life of the spirit. 
Leave a university uninfluenced by ever new 

earnestness and devotion on the part of stu- 

138 



SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY 129 

dent and teacher, and how soon it becomes a 
scholastic machine, positively oppressing the 
mind and spirit. 

There is a true sense in which the universe 
exists momentarily by the grace of God. 
Take light away, and you have darkness. 
Take darkness away, and you have not neces- 
sarily light; you might have chaos. Take 
health away, and you have disease. Take 
disease away, and you have not necessarily 
health; you may have death. Take virtue 
away, and you have vice. Take vice away, 
and you have not necessarily virtue; you 
might have negative respectability. Thus it 
is the continual affirmation of the good that 
keeps the heritage of yesterday and takes the 
step toward to-morrow. 

Nevertheless, if there is no easy solution of 
the problem, there are certain big lines of at- 
tack. If we are right in our diagnosis, that 
the problem of democracy is a problem of 
education, then our whole system of educa- 
tion, for child, youth and adult, should be re- 
constructed to focus upon the building of 
positive and effective moral personality. 

American education began as a subsidiary 



I30 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

process. Children got organic education in 
the home, on the farm, in the work shop. 
They went to school to get certain formal dis- 
ciplines, to learn to read, write and cipher 
and to acquire formal grammar. With the 
moving into the cities, the industrial revolu- 
tion and the entire transformation of our life, 
the school has had to take over more and more 
of the process of organic education. If chil- 
dren fail to get such education in the school, 
they are apt to miss it altogether. 

With this entire change in the meaning of 
the school, old notions of its purpose still sur- 
vive. Probably no one is so benighted to-day 
as to imagine that the chief function of the 
school is to fill the mind with information; 
but there are many who still hold to the tra- 
dition that the chief purpose of education is 
to sharpen the intellectual tools of the individ- 
ual for the sake of his personal success. This 
notion is a misleading survival, for tools are 
of value only in terms of the character using 
them. The same equipment may serve, 
equally, good or bad ends. Only as education 
focusses on the development of positive and 



SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY 131 

effective moral character can it aid in solving 
the problem of democracy. 

Need it be added that this does not mean 
teaching morals and manners to children, 
thirty minutes a day, three times a week? 
That is a minor fragment of moral educa- 
tion. It means that all phases of the process 
— the relation of pupil and teacher, school and 
home, the government and discipline, the les- 
sons taught in every subject, the environment, 
the proportioning of the curriculum, of physi- 
cal, emotional and intellectual culture — all 
shall be focussed and organized upon the one 
significant aim of the whole — character. 

Further, if education is to overcome the 
menaces and solve the dilemma of democracy, 
it must be carried beyond childhood and 
youth and outside the walls of academic in- 
stitutions. The ever wider education of adult 
citizenship is indispensable to the progress 
and safety of democracy. It is one of the 
glaring illustrations of the inefficiency of our 
democracy that there are still communities 
where school boards build school houses with 
public money, open them five or six hours, 
five days in the week, and refuse to allow them 



132 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

i 

to be opened any other hour of the day or 
night, for a civic forum, parents' meeting, 
public lecture or other activity of adult edu- 
cation; and yet we call ourselves a practical 
people! Surely, in a democracy, the state is 
as vitally interested in the education of the 
adult citizen as of the child. 

Herein is the significance of those various 
extensions of education, developing and 
spreading so widely to-day. University-ex- 
tension and Chautauqua movements, civic 
forums, free lectures to the people by boards 
of education and public libraries, summer 
schools, night schools for adults — all are illus- 
trations of this movement, so vital to the prog- 
ress of democracy. Through these instrumen- 
talities the popular ideal may be elevated, the 
public mind may be trained to more logical 
and earnest thought, citizenship may be made 
more serious and intelligent, and finally a 
most helpful influence may be exerted on the 
academic institutions themselves. It is an eas- 
ily verifiable truth that any academic institu- 
tion that builds around itself an enclosing 
scholastic wall, refuses to go outside and serve 
and learn in the larger world of humanity, 



SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY 133 

in the long run inevitably dies of academic 
dry rot. 

In the endeavor to solve the problem of de- 
mocracy cannot we do more than we have 
done hitherto in cultivating reverence for 
moral leadership — the quality so much needed 
in democracy at the present hour? This may 
be achieved through many aspects of educa- 
tion, but especially through contact with noble 
souls in literature and history. History, 
above all, is the great opportunity, and, from 
this point of view, is it not necessary to re- 
write our histories: instead of portraying 
solely statesmen and warriors, to fill them 
with lofty examples of leadership in all walks 
of life? 

Women as well as men: for surely ideals of 
both should be fostered. A colleague, inter- 
ested in this problem, recently took one of the 
most widely used text-books of American his- 
tory, and counted the pages on which a woman 
was mentioned. Of the ^vc hundred pages, 
there were four: not four pages devoted to 
women; but four mentioning a woman. What 
does it mean: that women have contributed 
less than one part in a hundred and twenty- 



134 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

five to the development of American life? 
Surely no one would think that. What, then, 
are the reasons for the discrepancy? There 
are several, but one may be mentioned: men 
have written the histories, and they have writ- 
ten chiefly of the two fields of action where 
men have been most important and women 
least, war and statesmanship. Surely, how- 
ever, if American history is to reveal the 
American spirit, exercise the contagion of 
noble ideals and develop reverence for true 
moral leadership, it must present types of 
both manhood and womanhood in all fields of 
action and endeavor. 

One who has stood with Socrates in the 
common criminal prison in Athens and 
watched him drink the hemlock poison, say- 
ing "No evil can happen to a good man in 
life or after death," who has heard the ora- 
tion of Paul on Mars Hill or that of Pericles 
over the Athenian dead, who has thrilled to 
the heroism of Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell, 
the noble service of Elizabeth Fry and Flor- 
ence Nightingale, the high appeal of Helen 
Hunt Jackson and Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
ing, who has heard Giordano Bruno exclaim 



SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY 135 

as the flames crept up about him, "I die a 
martyr, and willingly," who has responded to 
the calm elevation of Marcus Aurelius, the 
cosmopolitan wisdom of Goethe, the sweet 
gentleness of Maeterlinck's spirit and the ti- 
tan dreams of Ibsen, can scarcely fail to ap- 
preciate the brotherhood of all men and to 
learn that reverence for the true moral leader, 
that dignifies alike giver and recipient. 



XX 

TRAINING FOR MORAL LEADER- 
SHIP 

Since the path of democracy is education, 
moral leadership is more necessary to it, than 
in any other form of society; yet there are 
exceptional obstacles to its development. We 
speak of "the white light that beats upon a 
throne": it is nothing compared to the search 
light played upon every leader of democracy. 
With our lack of reverence, v^e delight in 
pulling to pieces the personalities of those 
w^ho lead us. Thus it is increasingly difficult 
to get men of sensitive spirit to pay the price 
of leadership for democracy. 

Is it not possible to do more than we have 

done, consciously to develop such leadership? 

Where is it trained? In life, the college and 

university, the normal school, the schools of 

law, medicine and theology. Yes, but if not 

one boy and girl in ten graduates from the 

high school, surely we want one man and 

136 



TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 137 

woman in ten to fulfill some measure of moral 
leadership, and the high school is directly 
concerned with the task of furnishing such 
leadership for American democracy. 

If that is true, is it not a pity that the high 
school is so largely dominated from above by 
the demand of the college upon the entering 
freshman? It is not to be taken for granted 
that the particular regimen of studies, best 
fitting the student to pass the entrance exam- 
inations of a college or university, is the best 
possible for the nine out of ten students, who 
go directly from the high school into the 
world, and must fulfill some measure of moral 
leadership for American democracy. The 
presumption is to the contrary. College pro- 
fessors are human — some of them. They want 
students prepared to enter as smoothly as pos- 
sible into the somewhat artificial curricula 
of academic studies they have arranged. The 
Latin professor wishes not to go back and 
start with the rudiments of his subject, as the 
professor of mathematics with the beginnings 
of Algebra and Geometry. The result is they 
demand of the high school what fits most 
.smoothly into their scheme. 



138 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

Now if it is not possible to serve equally 
the needs of both groups, would it not be bet- 
ter to neglect the one tenth of the students, 
going on to college, even assuming they are 
the pick of the flock, which they are not al- 
ways? They have four more years to correct 
their mistakes and round out their culture. If 
any one must be subordinated, it would be bet- 
ter to neglect them, and focus upon the needs 
of the nine out of ten, who go directly from 
the high school into life and have not an- 
other chance ; yet there are states in the Union, 
where it is possible for a committee of the 
state university at the top to say to every high 
school teacher in the state, ^'Conform to our 
requirements, or leave the state, or get out of 
the profession." The threat, moreover, has 
been carried out more than once. 

That situation is utterly wrong. We want 
organization of the educational system, with 
each unit cooperating with the next higher, 
but if education is to solve the problem of de- 
mocracy and furnish moral leadership for 
American life, we want each unit to be free, 
first of all, to serve its own constituency to the 
best of its power. The problem is not scrimis 



TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 139 

for the big city high school, with its multi- 
plied elective courses, but for the small rural 
or town high school, with its limited corps of 
teachers and its necessarily fixed courses, the 
burden is onerous indeed. 

Is the American college and university do- 
ing all that it might do in cultivating moral 
leadership for American democracy? The 
last decades have seen an astounding and un- 
paralleled development of higher education 
in America. In the old days, the college was 
usually on a denominational foundation. It 
was supported by the dollars and pennies of 
earnest religionists who believed that educa- 
tion was necessary to religion and morality. 
The president was generally a clergyman of 
the denomination ; he taught the ethics course, 
and all students were required to take it. 
There was compulsory chapel attendance, and 
once a day the entire student body gathered 
together to listen to some moral and religious 
thought. 

Then came the immense expansion of 
higher education. Courses were multiplied 
and diversified. Universities were established 
or endowed by the state. Academics became 



I40 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

colleges, and colleges, universities. Institu- 
tions were generally secularized. Compul- 
sory chapel attendance was rightly abandoned. 
Each department served its own interest 
apart. Until to-day certain of our great uni- 
versities are not unlike vast intellectual de- 
partment stores, with each professor calling 
his goods across the counter, and the president, 
a sort of superior floorwalker, to see that no 
one clerk gets too many customers. It is an 
impressive illustration of what has happened 
to our higher institutions that, in certain of 
them, the one regular meeting place of the en- 
tire student body in a common interest, is the 
bleachers by the athletic field. One continues 
to believe in college athletics, in spite of the 
frequent absurdities and worse, done in their 
name; only if the numbers of those playing 
the game and those exercising only their lungs 
and throats from the bleachers, were reversed, 
better all-round athletic education would re- 
sult. Is it not, however, a trenchant criticism 
on the situation in our higher education, that 
so often the one common interest should be in 
something that is, at least, aside from the 
main business of the institution? 



TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 141 

Moreover, no institution can rightly serve 
democracy, unless it is itself democratic. 
Thus the growth of an aristocratic spirit in 
our colleges and universities is an ominous 
sign. For instance, it is still true that any boy 
or girl, with a sound body and a good mind 
and no family to support, can get a college 
education. Money is not indispensable: it is 
possible to work one's way through. Will 
this always be true? One wonders. It is sig- 
nificant that it is easiest to work your way 
through college, and keep your self-respect 
and the respect of your fellows, in the small, 
meagerly endowed college on the frontier. It 
is most difficult, with a few exceptions one 
gladly recognizes, in the great, rich universi- 
ties of the East. What does that mean? 

Straws show the tide: it was announced 
some time ago by the president of one of our 
richest and oldest universities that henceforth 
scholarships in that institution would be 
given solely on the basis of intellectual schol- 
arship, as tested by examination; and ap- 
plause went up from the alumni all across the 
country; yet what does it mean? It means 
that the boy who has to work on a threshing 



142 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

machine, sell books to an unsuspecting public, 
or do some other semi-honorable work all 
summer to get back into college in the Fall, 
cannot pass those examinations equally with a 
rich man's son of equal mind, who can take a 
tutor to the seashore or the mountains and 
coach up all summer. Thus foundations, es- 
tablished by well-meaning people to help poor 
boys self-respectingly through college, be- 
come intellectual prizes for those who do not 
need them. That is all wrong. 

Take the special student problem. When a 
college or university is founded, it needs stu- 
dents: they are the life-blood of the institu- 
tion. Really all that is needed to make a 
college is a teacher and some students : build- 
ings are not indispensable, but students the 
school must have. Thus it is apt to keep its 
bars down and its entrance requirements flexi- 
ble. Special students, often mature men and 
women, who are not prepared to pass the 
freshman examinations, are admitted on the 
recommendation of heads of departments, to 
special courses they are well fitted to take. 
Students are admitted freely, and then sifted 
out afterward, if they prove unworthy of their 



TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 143 

opportunity: not a bad method, by the way. 

A dozen years pass, and the institution 
wants to become respectable. It is just as 
with the individual: the man, at first, is ab- 
sorbed in money-getting, and when he has it, 
yearns for respectability. Now getting re- 
spectable, for a college or university, is called 
^'raising the standard of scholarship." Let 
this not be misunderstood: painstaking, in- 
finitely laborious, accurate scholarship is a 
noble aim, well worth the consistent effort of 
a lifetime; but there are two sides to raising 
the standard of scholarship. Does an educa- 
tional institution exist for the sake of its repu- 
tation, or to serve its constituency? If it seeks 
to advance its reputation at the expense of its 
fullest and best service to those who need its 
help, is it not recreant to its duty and oppor- 
tunity? 

Well, in the mood cited, the institution 
raises and standardizes its entrance-require- 
ments and generally excludes special students. 
One readily sees why: it is much easier to 
work with the regularly prepared freshman, 
he fits much more smoothly and comfortably 
into the machinery of the institution. Many 



144 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

a wise teacher will admit, nevertheless, that 
the best students he ever taught and the ones 
whose lives he is proudest of having influ- 
enced, were often men and women, thirty, 
forty, fifty years of age — teachers who sud- 
denly realized that the ruts of their calling 
had become so deep they could no longer see 
over them, ministers awakening to the fact 
that they had given all their store and must 
get a new supply, business men aware of a 
call to another field of action — working with 
a consistent earnestness the average fledgling 
freshman cannot imagine — he is not old 
enough; yet generally the tendency is to ex- 
clude such students, unless they will go back 
and do the arduous, and often for them use- 
less, work of preparing to pass the examina- 
tions for entrance to the freshman class. That, 
too, is all wrong. 

The American college and university stands 
to-day at the parting of the ways: this gen- 
eration will largely determine its future. If 
the American college and university ever be- 
comes a social club for the sons and daugh- 
ters of the rich, an institution making it easy 
for them to secure business and professional 



TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 145 

opportunity and advancement, to the exclu- 
sion of their poorer fellows, it may be as nec- 
essary to disestablish the foundations of our 
great universities, as statesmen in Europe 
thought it necessary to disestablish the mon- 
astic foundations at the close of the middle 
age. They, too, began as educational insti- 
tutions. If, on the other hand, the American 
college and university remains true to its task, 
if it keeps its doors open and its spirit demo- 
cratic, if it seeks to render ever larger service 
to the great public and to develop moral lead- 
ership for American democracy, then, indeed, 
it will go ever forward upon its noble path. 



XXI 

DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE 

We have seen the conflict of ideas in the 
War: the German philosophy that man exists 
for the state, the contrasting idea of democ- 
racy that the state exists for man. We may 
well ask why any institution should be re- 
garded as sacred, except as it has the adventi- 
tious sacredness, coming from time, conven- 
tion and hoary tradition. It was said long ago 
that "the Sabbath was made for man and not 
man for the Sabbath," and the statement may 
be universalized. Every institution on earth 
— marriage, the family, education, the church, 
the state — ^was made for man and not man 
for the institution. Humanity must always 
be the end. Why should we perpetuate any 
institution that does not serve life? Kant 
voiced the principle in his second imperative 
of duty: "Always treat humanity, whether 
in thine own person or that of any other, as 

an end withal, and never as a means only." 

146 



DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE 147 

Kant was a Prussian philosopher: one won- 
ders what he would have thought of the 
^'Kanonen-Futter" theory of manhood! 

An organization or institution is only a ma- 
chine, an instrument for a purpose. Thus al- 
ways it is a means, never an end : its value lies 
in serving its purpose — the end of human life. 
So the whole existing order must justify itself. 
Where it rests on forms of injustice, it must 
be broken or destroyed, and there is no reason 
to fear the breaking. 

Thus there is no ^'divine right" of kings. 
They represent a vested interest, surviving 
from the past. They must justify themselves 
by the service of those under them, or pass. 

Similarly, there is no divine right of a class 
or caste, enjoying supremacy or special priv- 
ilege. It also is a surviving vested interest, 
that must justify itself, or be swept aside as an 
incubus. 

The same test applies to an empire. It, too, 
is a vested interest, developed out of condi- 
tions prevailing in the past. If it does not jus- 
tify itself by the largest service of all within 
it, then it, too, is an anachronistic survival, 
no longer to be tolerated. 



148 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

The principle is universal: the institution 
of private property, the controlling power of 
captains of industry, the capitalistic system, 
finally, the state itself, in every form: all are 
vested interests that may be permitted to con- 
tinue in the exercise of power only as they 
prove their superiority to any other form of 
organization in serving the good of all. 

This does not mean that, under democracy, 
the individual shall fail of sacrifice and the 
dedication to something higher than himself. 
That is the glory of life, transfiguring human 
nature, and without it, life sinks to sordid sel- 
fishness. Your life is worth, not what you 
have, but what you are, and what you are is 
determined by that to which you dedicate 
yourself. Is it creature comforts, pleasure, 
selfish privilege, or the largest life and the 
fullest service of humanity? What you have 
is merely the condition, the important ques- 
tion is, what do you do with it? Is it wealth, 
prosperity: do you sit down comfortably on 
the fact of it, to secure all the selfish pleasures 
possible ; or do you regard your fortunate cir- 
cumstances as so much more opportunity and 
obligation of leadership and service? Is it 



DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE 149 

poverty, even starvation : do you whine and 
grovel, or stand erect, with shut teeth, and 
wring heroic manhood from the breast of suf- 
fering? 

That is why peace can never be an end : it, 
too, is merely a condition or means. The 
question is, what do you do with your peace, 
for peace may mean merely sloth and cow- 
ardly ease, where war may mean unselfish 
heroism. That is what the peace promoters 
forget. War has its brutalities, and terrible 
indeed they are: unleashed hate, lust, cruelty 
and revenge; but war has its heroisms. It 
calls out the devotion to something higher 
than the individual from even the commonest 
of men. To-day all over the earth, ordinary 
men are quietly going out to probable death 
or mutilation in its most horrible forms, and 
going for the sake of an ideal larger than 
themselves. Women are doing even more 
than that. For it is not so hard to die, but to 
send out those you love, dearer than life itself, 
to almost certain death — that, indeed, is diffi- 
cult, and women are doing it everywhere with 
a smile on their lips and choked-back tears. 

Peace, on the other hand, has its virtues: 



I50 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

the softening and refining of life, gradual de- 
velopment of sympathy, achievement of com- 
fort and beauty; but peace has its vices. In 
times of peace and prosperity there seems to 
be no great cause at stake. Of course, always 
it is there, but we do not see it. We become 
increasingly absorbed in selfish interests, in 
the good of our immediate family. Thus 
petty, time-serving selfishness is the vice pe- 
culiarly characteristic of times of peace and 
prosperity. Consider, for instance, the spirit 
of France during the closing years of the 
nineteenth century, and at the present dark, 
but pregnant, hour of destiny. 

Thus the question is not whether you have 
peace or war, but what you do with your peace 
or war. It is not whether you are rich or 
poor, but what you do with your riches or 
poverty. 

Suppose we were able to reconstruct our en- 
tire social and industrial world, so that every 
human being would have plenty to eat, plenty 
to wear and a comfortable house to live in: 
would we have the kingdom of heaven? Not 
necessarily: we might have merely a comfort- 
able, wcll-decoratcd pig-sty, if man lived to 



DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE 151 

nothing higher than pigs. "Man cannot live 
by bread alone," important as bread is, but by 
dedication to the things of the spirit. 

Thus there must ever be the capacity for 
self-forgetfulness, self-sacrifice, the dedica- 
tion of life to supreme aims, but that does not 
mean the dedication of man to the institution. 
Rather it is the consecration to the welfare of 
humanity. Man for the State means autoc- 
racy and imperialism; Man for Mankind is 
the soul of democracy. That is the ideal to 
which we must rise, if democracy is to prove 
itself worthy to be the form of human society 
for the great future. 

This ideal is realized through many lesser 
forms and instruments, but always with the 
same final test. The family, for instance, is 
one of these lesser forms, and the subordina- 
tion of the individual to the family unit is just. 
Thus there is a measure of right in seeking 
first the interest of the family group ; but when 
this is sought to the end of special privilege 
and debauching luxury, against the welfare 
of all, it becomes, as we have seen, an evil. 

There is, similarly, a certain justice in the 
subordination of the individual to the social 



152 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

class or group interest. It is right that arti- 
sans should unite in trade unions, that em- 
ployers should get together in associations for 
common benefit. One need only contrast the 
conditions where each workman had to bid in 
competition against all others, and each man- 
ufacturer, the same, to realize the advance 
made through group union and cooperation. 
When either group, however, seeks to further 
its own interest at the expense of the welfare 
of the whole society, as in securing class legis- 
lation, achieving monopolies, holding efficient 
workers to the level of production of the slow- 
est and least capable of the group, then the 
class or group spirit becomes an evil that must 
be fought for the good of all. 

It is exactly the same with the nation. Its 
interest is justly served only in harmony with 
the welfare of humanity. Any current prob- 
lem will illustrate the principle, as, for in- 
stance, that of immigration. 

Certainly the nation has the right to pro- 
hibit immigration which produces unassimi- 
lated plague-spots and threatens to cause ra- 
cial deterioration, as in phases of Oriental im- 
migration to the Pacific coast. Similarly, it 



DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE 153 

is right to restrict immigration that would 
further economic prosperity, at the expense of 
the manhood of the nation. We must answer 
the question, whether we want factories or 
men. It is desirable to have some of both, of 
course, but when one is to be obtained at the 
expense of the other, it is manhoood that must 
be the deciding end. 

On the other hand, when it comes to refus- 
ing a refuge to the poor and oppressed, who 
are physically and morally acceptable, but 
lack a small amount of money, or are unable 
to respond to a literary test, then the welfare 
of humanity demands the opposite decision. 
Better give them the fifty dollars — a healthy 
slave was worth more than that in the old 
days. So teach them to read and write. The 
nation can readily pay the small economic 
price and accept the incidental difficulties for 
the sake of the larger end. 

Thus the deciding principle must always 
be the welfare, happiness, growth, intelli- 
gence, helpfulness of each individual in har- 
mony with all others. Humanity is incarnate 
in each man. While, therefore, the individ- 
ual must dedicate and, at times, sacrifice him- 



154 THE SOUL' OF DEMOCRACY 

self, it is for the sake, not of the state, church 
or other institution, but for the welfare of all 
— Man for Mankind. 

From so many sources the view finds ex- 
pression that modern life has been "weakened 
by humanitarianism." If there is truth in 
the view, we would better take account of it 
and radically revise our ethical philosophy. 
If it is false, it is a damning error, the reitera- 
tion of which tends to undermine all that has 
been achieved for the spirit. 

An interesting comment on the view is the 
fact that, in spite of all its horrors, this War 
has given no attested instance of arrant cow- 
ardice on any front. Cruelty, lust, brutality, 
hate: these have appeared in unspeakable 
guise, but apparently no cowardice or weak 
timidity; yet the mail clad heroes of ancient 
wars, who met their adversaries face to face, 
were subjected to no such strain as the men 
standing in trenches waiting momentarily 
death or mutilation from an unseen foe. No, 
modern life has not lost strong fiber and is ca- 
pable of supreme heroism. 

The old society secured its leadership 
through noblesse oblige — the obligation of no- 



DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE 155 

bility. Men of aristocratic family and rank 
felt that, because they stood above the people, 
they owed a certain leadership and service, 
and they gave it, often in abundant measure, 
but always condescendingly from above. 

We have lost "noblesse oblige": we may 
even be glad it is gone, if we can substitute for 
it something larger and better. It is not the 
obligation of nobility, but the obligation of 
humanity that is the need: to realize that all 
power is obligation. As you can, you owe; 
and as you know, you owe. If you have 
money, it is so much obligation of leadership 
and service. If you have talent, education, 
social or political influence, it is all so much 
obligation of leadership and service. If, as 
individuals, we can generally realize that and 
act upon it, then indeed we may hope to carry 
to successful completion the experiment of 
democracy and see our beloved country ful- 
fill the measure of moral leadership to which 
we believe she is called among the nations of 
the earth, but fulfilling it not as master over 
slave, nor as one empire among others, but as 
a more experienced brother toward others fol- 
lowing the same open path. 



XXII 
THE HOUR OF SACRIFICE 

The supreme world crisis is on. We have 
entered the War in the purest spirit of democ- 
racy. We state frankly in advance that we 
want no indemnity, no extension of territory. 
We war with no people, except as that people 
identifies itself with aggressive autocracy and 
imperialism, imperilling our safety, as of all 
democracies, and seeking to ride tyrannically 
and unjustly over the rights and liberties of 
other peoples. Thus we enter the War solely 
for the cause of democracy and humanity. 

The hour of sacrifice has struck for the 
American people: will it rise to the test? 
When one considers the characteristics of our 
surface life for recent decades — the devotion 
to money-getting, the rapid increase of sense- 
less and debauching luxury, the reckless 
frivolity, the unthinking haste and selfish 

pleasure-seeking — one questions. Underneath, 

156 



THE HOUR OF SACRIFICE 157 

however, is a tremendous latent idealism. 
We are young, enthusiastic, capable of glor- 
ious consecration. Cynical disillusionment is 
all upon the surface — the cult of the clique 
of cleverness, uprooted from the soil of com- 
mon life and the deeps of the eternal verities. 
Beneath in the great mass of the people is pro- 
found faith in life, deep trust in the ideal, 
belief in the great future of humanity. De- 
mocracy will justify itself. We shall rise to 
the test; but how we need to hear and heed the 
call ! 

"Awake America" means Americans 
awake! For in democracy the individual is 
the soul. On each person rests the respon- 
sibility. Let us accept the bitter burden and 
meet the supreme test, giving time, money, 
service, life and those we love better than life, 
for the sake of the safer, freer, nobler world 
that is to be. Since we stood apart so long 
and entered the horrible devastation so late, 
it is our privilege to do all we can to save the 
spiritual heritage of humanity, to keep our 
hearts clean from the corrosive acid of na- 
tional and racial hatred, to do all in our 
power to remove it from the breasts of others. 



158 THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY 

Injustice in high places is possible only be- 
cause there is injustice in the hearts of men. 
To overthrow tyranny is but the initial step 
of emancipation : unless the tyrant hate in the 
heart is dethroned, the external tyrant, in 
some form of social injustice will surely re- 
turn. He who conquers hate and the lust for 
revenge in his own breast is spiritually free 
and master of the tyrant that wrongs him. 
Thus it is our privilege and duty to hate no 
one; but to hate injustice, greed, tyranny, ag- 
gressive selfishness, the wicked ambitions of 
autocratic imperialism, to resist and help to 
overthrow them, and so do our part in bring- 
ing in the free brotherhood of the nations and 
peoples in one humanity, that will be the dawn 
of the longed-for era of universal and per- 
manent peace for mankind. 



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